Hospitals Shutter Maternity Wards Amid Falling Birthrates
More hospitals are getting out of the baby business. Last month, Ohio-based University Hospitals said it would halt maternity services in the city of Ashland. OSF HealthCare said its hospital in Pontiac, Ill., would do so in September.
Trinity Health plans to stop delivering babies in Troy, N.Y., and Baker City, Ore. Megan Nelson, an emergency-room nurse for Trinity Health’s St. Alphonsus Medical Center in Baker City, has never delivered a baby.
She will soon be responsible for women who arrive in labor and can’t get to the nearest hospital with maternity services, a 45-minute drive away. “It’s a scary prospect," said Nelson, a member of the Oregon Nurses Association. The closures are broadening a swath of America without maternity units, commonly communities that are sparsely populated or aging.
The trend threatens to worsen infant health and maternal death rates that have hit the highest level in decades. Hospitals that are closing maternity units said they can’t recruit enough staff to safely operate. Hospitals with fewer births are less attractive to doctors and nurses, executives said.
Births at OSF HealthCare St. James-John W. Albrecht Medical Center in Illinois declined to 120 last year from 184 in 2019.
“There’s just not enough babies to be had," said Dr. Michael Cruz, OSF HealthCare’s chief operating officer. Roughly 2.2 million women of childbearing age lived in so-called maternity deserts in 2020, according to March of Dimes, which it defined as counties without a hospital, a birth center, and doctors and nurse midwives with experience delivering babies.
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