Two Alabama hospitals will be closing their maternity wards by the end of the month, according to NBC. The women in two counties will, like so many women living outside the most populous zip codes in the United States, be forced to drive 100 miles or more to deliver babies or receive maternity care.
While the mainstream media is quick to push the abortion agenda by blaming pro-life laws, the actual reasons for maternal care deserts are complex, and coming up with real solutions will prove elusive so long as the media narrative ignores the truth.
Lack of available maternity care is not caused by pro-life laws
The new standard media narrative has made these closings about pro-life laws. For example, in March of this year, the shuttering of a maternity ward in Idaho made headlines when a press release blamed its closing on the state’s new pro-life laws. However the same statement gave many more reasons – many of which were actually measurable, such as low patient volume, and thus low demand. Yet media outlets peddled their preferred narrative, claiming an unequivocally direct connection between the closing and the state’s pro-life laws, while practically ignoring other reasons.
However, given how few OBGYN physicians commit abortions, there is little evidence that pro-life laws are causally related to maternity care deserts.
The fact is, the closure of maternity wards is not a problem only for states with pro-life laws. According to the March of Dimes, these voids exist in abortion-friendly states – the problem isn’t laws, but population density. Dr. Zsakeba Henderson of the March of Dimes pointed out the discrepancy between the number of obstetricians and where they choose to live and practice. “The number of obstetric providers (meaning obstetricians and certified midwives) in the U.S. actually increased — by 1.7% — between the 2020 and 2022 reports, Henderson says. But only about 7% of providers serve rural areas,” reports NPR.
One often-overlooked reason why rural areas are obstetrically underserved relates to the affordability of healthcare or health insurance. For instance, the March of Dimes report includes in its definition of “low access” to maternity care a metric regarding whether 10% or more of women in a county are without health insurance. Another reason is demographic shifts and the ensuing economic incentives. Shifts in local populations’ ages also lead to lower birth volumes and thus lower demand, leaving the fewer number of women of childbearing age subject to the law of supply and demand affecting their access to maternity care.
Maternity care suffers when abortion is incentivized
With the rising cost of healthcare and insurance, many in positions of power in the U.S. have recognized abortion as the “cheaper” option. CEOs have put in writing that banning abortion is “bad for business,” and many companies have also scaled back on their maternity care benefits and beefed up so-called “abortion benefits.”
The Biden administration has launched a whole-of-government initiative to push abortion access and even forced taxpayers to pay for the abortion travel of U.S. military members. In short, the current presidential administration and billion-dollar companies like Disney, Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu are seeking to make it far easier to obtain an abortion than to have a baby.
By incentivizing abortion, these major power players are creating a culture that avoids investing in solutions to maternal care deserts. The problem of maternal care deserts becomes part of a culture that disproportionately harms vulnerable populations like minorities and impoverished groups, who are already targeted by the abortion industry. Planned Parenthood’s origins are tied to the racist eugenics movement that sought to target poor Black communities.
As Live Action News has reported, recent Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data shows that minority women continue to represent a disproportionate share of the total abortions in the U.S. And according to the 2022 March of Dimes report, one in four indigenous babies (26%) and one in six black babies (16%) were born in maternal health care deserts, where risk of poor health outcomes and even death were higher than in the rest of the country. As Live Action News has reported, women need maternity and prenatal care for the nearly 500,000 babies and roughly seven million American women of childbearing age – not abortion.
Medical professionals are stressed
Why aren’t there more OBGYN physicians in these maternal care deserts, most often in rural areas? According to NPR, the March of Dimes attributes the loss of obstetric providers and hospital services within rural counties to financial and logistical challenges, which were aggravated by the COVID pandemic. The medical profession as a whole suffered as a result of the pressures from every direction due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which have resulted in prominent nursing strikes and walk-outs due to unsafe staffing ratios and unfair compensation.
Economic factors also make it difficult to recruit and keep OBGYNs in rural areas. OBGYNs are the most-sued medical specialty; 83% have been sued at least once in their careers. The amount of malpractice insurance necessary to have on hand takes a chunk out of the ability to pay off student loans. New OBGYNs are not incentivized to move to rural areas with lower compensation, and where Medicaid reimbursement rates – already very low – have not caught up to rising healthcare costs.
And yet still the media uses circular logic to push the pro-abortion narrative. An ABC report claims that “people living in maternity care deserts without access to abortion may have to continue a dangerous pregnancy or one they don’t want, and may also struggle to find the care they need during that pregnancy and delivery.” The article goes on to claim that “abortion and maternity care aren’t unrelated […] because it takes the same clinical skill set to provide abortion care as it does to respond to things like miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.”
Here the logic is both circular and not based in fact.
Making abortion more widely available in maternal care deserts reduces demand, and therefore makes it less appealing for OBGYNs to move to these maternal care deserts. And the fact that most OBGYNs do not commit abortions belies the claim that somehow having abortion access will help provide better access to maternal care. Induced abortion isn’t health care and is not medically necessary, and no experience with abortion is required to give a physician the skills needed to address maternal care shortages, including in critical areas like miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies – both of which involve treatment, and not the direct and intentional killing of a preborn baby.
Maternal care deserts are a serious issue that affect women and babies across the United States every day. But as much as abortion advocates want to believe it, these are not caused by pro-life principles and pro-life laws. Instead of throwing more abortion at the issue, it requires a creative and thoroughly, systemically pro-life response rooted in an actual understanding of the complex roots of the problem.
