TV REVIEW : Grim Study of Infant Mortality

“Children are a country’s conscience. They’re a perfect mirror of our priorities and principles.” The speaker is filmmaker Steven Spielberg, appearing on “Shattered Lullabies,” a grim but flawed documentary about this country’s high infant mortality rate, airing at 9 tonight on the Lifetime cable channel.

Shot in the neonatal intensive care unit of a California hospital, this latest segment in Lifetime’s “Your Family Matters” documentary series focuses on a group of anguished, confused young mothers and their tube-filled babies’ struggle for survival.

Statistics and precautionary commentary are supplied by Spielberg, his co-host and wife, Kate Capshaw, and medical specialists: A child born in some Third World country has a better chance of survival than one born in some American cities. The varied causes are ignorance, poverty, epidemic teen pregnancies, drug and alcohol addiction; the underlying factor is the lack of available prenatal care.

Programs for the poor and uninsured are underfunded and overcrowded--a wait in the clinic can be more than six hours. The cost effectiveness of such programs seems to elude policy makers, yet $400 in prenatal care would save $400,000 in medical care for a sick baby, we’re told.

The information provided is effective enough. But “Shattered Lullabies” weakens its impact with patronizing TV-movie-of-the-week-type manipulation--arty camera techniques, haunting music and baby cries, shots of empty swings in a park and a fog-shrouded graveyard. It’s an inexplicable lapse for the series that has earned a name for excellence in previous segments on sex education and child-labor abuses.