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Cynthia G. Colen, PhD, Arline T. Geronimus, ScD, John Bound, PhD and Sherman A. James, PhD

Cynthia G. Colen is a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, Columbia University, New York, and is with the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Arline T. Geronimus is with the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education and the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan. John Bound is with the Department of Economics and the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass. Sherman A. James is with the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, the Department of Community and Family Medicine, and the Department of African and African American Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Cynthia G. Colen, Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, Columbia University, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, 420 W. 118th Street, Mail Code 3355, New York, NY 10027 (e-mail: cc2557{at}columbia.edu).

Objectives. We estimate the extent to which upward socioeconomic mobility limits the probability that Black and White women who spent their childhoods in or near poverty will give birth to a low-birthweight baby.

Methods. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the 1970 US Census were used to complete a series of logistic regression models. We restricted multivariate analyses to female survey respondents who, at 14 years of age, were living in households in which the income-to-needs ratio did not exceed 200% of poverty.

Results. For White women, the probability of giving birth to a low-birthweight baby decreases by 48% for every 1 unit increase in the natural logarithm of adult family income, once the effects of all other covariates are taken into account. For Black women, the relation between adult family income and the probability of low birthweight is also negative; however, this association fails to reach statistical significance.

Conclusions. Upward socioeconomic mobility contributes to improved birth outcomes among infants born to White women who were poor as children, but the same does not hold true for their Black counterparts.

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