NEW YORK – Pediatrician Dr. Joy Lawn credits a quick-thinking midwife with saving her life when she was born in northern Uganda more than four decades ago.

But the midwife attending her was clever enough to know that because the baby had not moved into the right position for delivery after 24 hours of labor, only a Cesarean section would save infant and mother. She sought help from a doctor.

‘I survived the odds because people expected me not to die,’ Lawn said Tuesday in a telephone interview from her base in Cape Town, South Africa. ‘We need health workers, we need governments not to expect newborns to die.’

Lawn, who works with the non-governmental organization Save the Children, and researchers from the World Health Organization, drive that point home in a new study looking at comprehensive global mortality rates for newborn babies.

Published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine, the study shows that babies under 4 weeks old account for 41 percent of child deaths worldwide.

Lawn said the United Nations and other international organizations must pay closer attention to the newborn mortality rates in order to save more children’s lives. The U.N. reports annually on deaths of children under ages 5 and […]