To my understanding, infant mortality has less to do with quality of care, and a lot more to do with environmental and genetic factors. The biggest causes of infant mortality in the US are congenital defects and complications due to premature birth.
This statement is a commonly held sentiment that can be trivially shown to be invalid.
Consider California, the state has seen a decline in maternal mortality by 65% while the rest of the US, especially states like Alabama have seen consistent increases of 700%+ in the same time period,
CMQCC was founded in 2006 at Stanford University School of Medicine together with the State of California in response to rising maternal mortality and morbidity rates. Since CMQCC’s inception, California has seen maternal mortality decline by 65 percent between 2006 to 2016, while the national maternal mortality rate continued to rise.
https://www.cmqcc.org/who-we-areAlabama's maternal mortality rate in 2012 was 6.9 per 100,000, 49.1 per 100,000 in 2016, and is now likely excess of that from 2023 onwards. The state suffers from what's now being called a, Maternity Care Desert, https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/local/alabam...
https://www.alreporter.com/2020/11/22/nearly-70-percent-of-a...
Actions matter. Even if there's a genetic factor that leads to a predisposition to an event, how that event is handled and, indeed, how prevention is addressed — a genetic predisposition is a probability that something will occur not a certainty — makes all the difference.
Just because someone was genetically predisposed to get a heart attack doesn't mean that their death from a heart attack was due to their "genetics."
Suppose the ambulance took 3 hours to arrive, only to deliver poorly trained paramedics that failed to administer care leading to the patient's death on a gurney en route to the hospital. In that case, the patient hasn't died due to genetics. They've been killed because of catastrophic, systemic failure. A systematic failure to address their elevated risk, a failure to prevent or mitigate said risk, and then a catastrophic failure in handling the event precipitated from this unmitigated risk.
There seem to be enough confounding factors that I'd question comparing infant mortality rates across borders to begin with.
These rates have been successfully reduced across the world and have gone up in certain parts of the US while declining in others. The fact that these rates are so sensitive to infrastructure, practises and care leads to an entirely different conclusion than the one implied here.