Baby boom - High birth rate among women in Georgia's burgeoning Latino community leads to upsurge in business for many metro Atlanta hospitals and prenatal clinics
Articles
Metro Atlanta is experiencing a baby boom.
In the great wave of Latino immigrants that has swept Atlanta over the past decade, thousands of young Hispanic women are having babies at twice the rate of the general population in Georgia. And they are changing the character and culture of delivery rooms from Gwinnett Medical Center and WellStar Cobb Hospital in Austell to Northside Hospital-Cherokee and Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta. ...
[At the] Atlanta Medical Center in downtown Atlanta, where 37 percent of the babies born last year were Hispanic, up from 12 percent in 2000...
HISPANIC BIRTHS IN METRO ATLANTA
Increase in Hispanic expectant mothers and babies at select metro hospitals:
. Gwinnett County: In 2003, 24 percent of the women admitted to the Women's Pavilion at Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville were Hispanic, compared with 17 percent of admissions in 2000.
. Cherokee County: At Northside Hospital-Cherokee, 32 percent of the babies born in 2003 were Hispanic, compared with 23 percent of those born there in 2000.
. Cobb County: Fourteen percent of the babies delivered at WellStar Cobb Hospital in Austell last year were Hispanic, compared with 6 percent of those born there in 2000. At WellStar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, the numbers rose from 18 percent to 20 percent in the same period. (WellStar executives say the numbers may be understated because ethnicity is self-reported.
. Atlanta: At Grady Memorial Hospital, 42 percent of the babies born in 2003 were Hispanic, compared with 30 percent in 2000.
. DeKalb County: About 8 percent of the population is Hispanic, but 12 percent of the babies born at DeKalb Medical Center in Decatur last year were Hispanic, compared with 11 percent in 2000.
Last year, for example, 37 percent of the babies born at Atlanta Medical Center were Hispanic, according to hospital Chief Executive Officer William Moore. That's up from only 12 percent of the babies born there in 2000...
For Georgia as a whole, the number of Hispanic births grew by 643 percent from 2,263 in 1990 to 16,819 in 2002, according to a report released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. For the same period, births of non-Hispanic whites stayed flat at about 68,000, and births of non-Hispanic blacks grew only 4 percent, to 42,001, according to the report.
Hispanic babies now account for 12.6 percent of all births in Georgia, compared with 2 percent in 1990, the report says.
While the fertility rate, or the number of live births among women ages 15 to 44, stayed flat at around 69 per 1,000 since 1990 for all Georgians, the fertility rate among Hispanics increased from 86.8 in 1990 to 141.4 in 2002...
Read the complete article.
