factors, on top of a general increase in the standard of living for those living in urban settings, helped the United States make dramatic improvements in their rates of infant mortality in the early 20th century. Although the overall infant mortality rate was sharply dropping during this time, within the United States infant mortality varied greatly among racial and socio-economic groups. The change in infant mortality from 1915 to 1933 was, for the white population, 98.6 in 1,000 to 52.8 in 1,000, and for the black population, 181.2 in 1,000 to 94.4 in 1,000. Studies imply that this has a direct correlation with relative economic conditions between these populations. Additionally, infant mortality in southern states was consistently 2% higher than other states in the US across a 20-year period from 1985. Southern states also tend to perform worse in predictors for higher infant mortality, such as per capita income and poverty rate. In the latter half of the 20th century, a focus on greater access to medical care for women spurred declines in infant mortality in the United States. The implementation of Medicaid, granting wider access to healthcare, contributed to a dramatic decrease in infant mortality, in addition to access to greater access to legal abortion and family-planning care, such the IUD and the birth control pill. In the decades following the 1970s, the United States' decreasing infant mortality rates began to slow, falling behind China's, Cuba's, and other developed countries'. Funding for the federally subsidized Medicaid and Maternal and Infant Care was sharply reduced, and availability of prenatal care greatly decreased for low-income parents. China The People's Republic of China's growth of medical resources in the latter half of the 20th century partly explains its dramatic improvement with regards to infant mortality during this time. Part of this increase included the adoption of the Rural Cooperative Medical System, which was founded in the 1950s. The Cooperative Medical System granted healthcare access to previously underserved rural populations, is estimated to have covered 90% of China's rural population throughout the 1960s. The Cooperative Medical System achieved an infant mortality rate of 25.09 per 1,000. The Cooperative Medical System was later defunded, leaving many rural populations to rely on an expensive fee-for-service system, although the rate continued to decline in general. This change in medical systems caused a socio-economic gap in accessibility to medical care in China, which fortunately was not reflected