Prepare CDC Natality Data — prepare_birth

Imports and preprocesses CDC natality public use files from 2016-2024.

prepare_birth_data(files, years_separate = FALSE, include_late_term = TRUE)

Arguments

files: Character vector of paths to CDC natality .txt files. Each file should contain data for a single birth year.
years_separate: If TRUE, returns a named list of processed data frames, one per year. If FALSE (default), combines all years into a single data frame.
include_late_term: If TRUE (default), late-term pregnancies (42+ weeks) are included in the NTSV definition. If FALSE, NTSV is restricted to 37-41 completed gestational weeks.

Value

If years_separate = FALSE, a data frame containing processed natality records from all supplied files.

If years_separate = TRUE, a named list of processed data frames per year.

Details

The function uses a bundled Python script to extract selected variables from fixed-width natality files, imports the resulting Parquet files into R, and constructs derived variables including cesarean delivery, labor, and an NTSV indicator. NTSV uses cephalic presentation as a proxy variable for vertex presentation, since the latter is not available.

This function requires a Python installation accessible through reticulate, as well as the Python packages pandas and pyarrow.

Examples


synthetic_files <- c(system.file(
    "extdata","synthetic_2023.txt",
     package = "natalityr"),
   system.file("extdata",
      "synthetic_2024.txt",
       package = "natalityr"))

natality <- prepare_birth_data(synthetic_files)