Article excerpts:

If U.S. 61 could sing a lullaby, it would whisper of the babies who were born too soon or weighed too little. The children who rarely live out their first few months, let alone their first birthdays.

Most of these babies are black. Most are poor. Many are born to teen mothers.

A large number of the deaths occur in the Delta communities clustered along U.S. 61 just south of DeSoto County, Tunica and Memphis. In 2005, nine out of the 10 babies who died in Coahoma County were black.

They are the children born to the women who travel four hours round trip by bus to mop floors and empty ash trays in Tunica casinos or use Medicaid to pay for 30-minute taxi rides to the health care clinic in Clarksdale.

n the meantime, physicians in places like Tutwiler, Clarksdale and across the Delta said infant mortality should be one of the state's No. 1 priorities.

"I haven't seen anything like it in Mississippi in all my years of practice," said Cris Glick, a neonatologist based in Jackson. "If we continue to ignore this, we'll face a big problem -- and that is that more black babies are dying than white babies."