year. In 2011 there was an 11.73% rate of babies born before the 37th week of gestation, down from a high of 12.80% in 2006. Economic expenditures on labor and delivery and neonatal care are relatively high in the United States. A conventional birth averages US$9,775 with a C-section costing US$15,041. Preterm births in the US have been estimated to cost $51,600 per child, with a total yearly cost of $26.2 billion. Despite this spending, several reports state that infant mortality rate in the United States is significantly higher than in other developed nations. Estimates vary; the CIA's World Factbook ranks the US 55th internationally in 2014, with a rate of 6.17, while the UN figures from 2005 to 2010 place the US 34th. Aforementioned differences in measurement could play a substantial role in the disparity between the US and other nations. A non-viable live birth in the US could be registered as a stillbirth in similarly developed nations like Japan, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, the Netherlands, and France—thereby reducing the infant death count. Neonatal intensive care is also more likely to be applied in the US to marginally viable infants, although such interventions have been found to increase both costs and disability. A study following the implementation of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act of 2002 found universal resuscitation of infants born between 20 and 23 weeks increased the neonatal spending burden by $313.3 million while simultaneously decreasing quality-adjusted life years by 329.3. The vast majority of research conducted in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century indicates that African-American infants are more than twice as likely to die in their first year of life than white infants. Although following a decline from 13.63 to 11.46 deaths per 1000 live births from 2005 to 2010, non-Hispanic black parents continued to report a rate 2.2 times as high as that for non-Hispanic white parents. Contemporary research findings have demonstrated that nationwide racial disparities in infant mortality are linked to the experiential state of the postpartum parent and that these disparities cannot be totally accounted for by socio-economic, behavioral or genetic factors. The Hispanic paradox, an effect observed in other health indicators, appears in the infant mortality rate, as well. Hispanic postpartum parents see an IMR comparable to non-Hispanic white postpartum parents, despite lower educational attainment and economic status. A study in North Carolina, for example, concluded that "white women who did