Text4baby Announces 50,000 Women Have Registered

Text4baby, a free mobile educational service that provides timely health information to women from early pregnancy through their babies’ first year, today announced that more than 50,000 participants have now registered to receive these weekly text messages

A program of the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB), text4baby has sent over two million English and Spanish text messages to help pregnant and new mothers with the information they need to give their babies the best possible start in life.

Launched in February 2010, text4baby was developed to help combat the infant mortality rate in the U.S., which is one of the highest in the industrialized world. For the first time since the 1950s, this rate has been on the rise. In addition, one of the leading causes of infant mortality is prematurity. Key predictors of a child’s chances for survival are birth weight and gestational age. Signifying a public health crisis, more than 500,000 babies – or 1 in every 8 – are born prematurely and an estimated 28,000 children will die before their first birthday in the U.S.

With more than 1.5 trillion text messages being sent and received in 2009 and since it is a popular form of communications by women of childbearing age and minority populations, text4baby decided to deliver the vital health information via text messages to those who need and want these recommendations the most.

According to text4baby enrollment numbers, 95 percent of participants would recommend the service to a friend. 65 percent of the enrollees are pregnant while 34 percent have new infants. The states with the most participants are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Virginia and Illinois.

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