Rural Hospitals Are Shuttering Their Maternity Units

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/health/rural-hospitals-pregnancy-childbirth.html

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https://archive.is/WUptQ


TOPPENISH, Wash. — Three days before Christmas, the only hospital in this remote city on the Yakama Indian Reservation abruptly closed its maternity unit without consulting the community, the doctors who delivered babies there or even its own board.

At least 35 women were planning to give birth at Astria Toppenish Hospital in January alone, and the sudden closure — which violated the hospital’s commitment to the state to maintain critical services in this rural area — threw their plans into disarray.

Victoria Barajas, 34, expecting her first child, scrambled to find a new doctor before her due date, Jan. 7. Jazzmin Maldonado, a 29-year-old schoolteacher due to give birth soon, wondered how she could make it to a distant hospital in time.

After an earlier miscarriage, doctors had placed a stitch in her cervix to prevent a second one, and the stitch would have to come out fast once labor began.

Astria Toppenish Hospital is one of a string of providers across the nation that have stopped providing labor and delivery care in an effort to control costs — even as maternal deaths increase at alarming rates in the United States, and as more women develop complications that can be life-threatening.

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