Buying a Better Baby: Unconditional Income Transfers and Birth Outcomes.

Can society buy a better infant? This is, in essence, the question posed in this month’s Pediatrics article by Brownell et al.1 Studying a group of low-income Canadian women who participated in an unconditional cash transfer program (Healthy Baby Prenatal Benefit [HBPB]), the authors compared the birth outcomes of participants with outcomes among a group of low-income nonparticipants. They found that the group that received the equivalent of $81.00 per month over the second and third trimesters of their pregnancies experienced a 21% decrease in the rates of low birth weight and a 17.5% decrease in the rates of prematurity among other clinically important outcomes.