The country has an unusually high rate of late fetal deaths, and skeptics contend that when a baby is born in distress and dies after a few hours, this is somet

The country has an unusually high rate of late fetal deaths, and skeptics contend that when a baby is born in distress and dies after a few hours, this is sometimes categorized as a stillbirth to avoid recording an infant death. ... I’m not in a position to judge who’s right, but any manipulation seems unlikely to make a huge difference to the reported figures. What are we to make of that last sentence? The author seems to be saying "I don't know enough to judge" but then immediately follows that with a strong opinion as to who must be wrong. How are we as an audience supposed to gauge whether Kristof (the author) is right that the effects will be inconsequential even if the accusations of manipulation were true? The implication would seem to be that because he's writing his (clearly labeled) opinion in the New York Times, we should trust him as an expert, despite his disavowals. While we can't easily answer the question as to whether the statistics are manipulated, it turns out that there are at least clear answers to what the effect of the manipulation would be. In a 2015 article entitled "Infant Mortality in Cuba: Myth and Reality", Roberto Gonzalez runs the numbers and shows that the effect of reporting Early Neonatal Deaths as Late Fetal Deaths would be enough to completely change our interpretation of the statistics. Here's a summary of the paper's conclusions: https://thecubaneconomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Infant-Mortality-in-Cuba.pdf https://thecubaneconomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Infan... What should we make of this? Certainly a problem with a small detail like this doesn't mean the overall question isn't worth asking, and the "human interest" aspects of the story are certainly interesting, but it sure make me wonder how much we should trust the author's intuitions about other details in the story.