Goodreads asked Monica J Casper:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Monica J Casper I published my first book, The Making of the Unborn Patient, in 1998. This was based on my dissertation about fetal surgery and the politics of reproduction. While gathering data for that project, I became aware of significant racial disparities in infant mortality. While some babies were being saved through innovative surgical procedures, many others were dying of preventable causes. Black and Indigenous babies were and are far more likely to die in their first year of life than white babies, and this fact demanded further exploration. My work has been fueled, in part, by the knowledge that we know how to save babies from premature death, but we are not collectively making the right decisions to do so. Infant mortality is a social problem as much as - and perhaps more than - it is a medical problem.

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