CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The international community gives great importance to reducing infant mortality. Thus, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), adopted in 1989, calls on states to take steps to reduce it. Several international conferences, held after the CRC, retake the issue and deepen it: the World Summit for Children in 1990, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994; the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and the Special Session for Children in 2002. Their action plans set goals that specify the magnitude of infant mortality reduction that each state must achieve in terms of time. One issue to highlight in these conferences is that they are based on Human Rights. Then, the goals have to be achieved with equity. Thus, they propose reducing the gap between social sectors. However, none of the conferences says how to measure these differences. Thus, the evaluation of whether state reaches or not the goals depends on the chosen method for measurement. Moreover, none of them says which social groups have to be compared, so the results also depend on it. Thus, according to methodological criteria used and depending on the chosen level of disaggregation to compare levels of infant mortality, the findings maybe different. So we can obtain different conclusions about the compliance on ensuring the rights of the Childs. In this context, we ask: Has Argentina reduced enough infant mortality to comply with international commitments? What happen to the differences? Despite the continued decrease in infant mortality rates since 1990, the attained outcomes will not be sufficient to reach all the proposed goals. The situation is worse in the case of the gaps, because they show unacceptable levels, increasing in some occasions.