Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Blaine County sees fewer births

Number of annual births expected to be down 20 percent


By TREVON MILLIARD
Express Staff Writer

Nurse Kirsten Lamb holds a baby at St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center last week. Photo by David N. Seelig

The stork won't be nearly as busy flying into the Wood River Valley this year.

About 20 percent fewer births are expected than normal, a possible side effect of the Great Recession.

Jenny Haynes, spokesperson for St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center, said the projected total by fiscal year's end, on Sept. 30, is 239 births. The average for the hospital, just south of Ketchum, is 300. The hospital's number of births was high in the 2008 fiscal year, at 314, and started decreasing in the 2009 fiscal year, which saw 288 births.

Haynes speculated that people are putting off having children, due to the great expense that comes with a caring for a baby. The annual average cost of raising one child is estimated at $10,700, according to 2010 calculations done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.

St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center has six labor rooms. Only one was in use last week.

Registered Nurse Kirsten Lamb said this isn't uncommon. She said the hospital would be seeing fewer births, but some parents have said they're waiting for the birth before moving away due to work drying up. She gave the example of an out-of-work family who'd lived in the valley a long time but was moving to their family's farm in Mexico after the baby was born.

Related Blaine County facts

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare released detailed information this summer about county births, deaths, marriages, divorces and more for 2008.

According to this data, the median mother's age is between 25 and 29 in Blaine County, same as the state as a whole, according to the report.

The health department also tracks babies born to wed parents. And one in four Blaine County babies was born out of wedlock, the same rate as the state. In these cases, the median mother was between 20 and 24 years old.

While 8.2 percent of all babies born in America in 2008 were of low birth weight, only 6.5 percent of Idaho-born babies and 5.9 percent of Blaine County babies were low in weight. The baby girl in St. Luke's maternity ward this week was born on July 19, weighing 9 lbs. 1 oz. Lamb said the average is 7.5 lbs.

While 307 babies were born in Blaine County in the 2008 calendar year, 43 pregnancies were aborted. The median age of these mothers was also 20 to 24, and 10 abortions came from mothers 35 or older.

Trevon Milliard: tmilliard@mtexpress.com




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