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The Trump administration wants Americans to have more children, but advocates have been warning for years that maternal and infant mortality rates are high in the U.S. NPR's Katia Riddle brings us a story about one woman in Georgia who's on a mission to make pregnancy and birth safer for families in her community.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: Standing in the Georgia heat one afternoon, Katie Chubb gestures out to an empty lot. This is where she's been trying to open a birth center for six years.
KATIE CHUBB: We're going to have a freestanding birth center here. It would be one-story.
RIDDLE: Chubb is a community organizer in a state with some of the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality. Chubb says This birth center is badly needed. The community is surrounded by maternal health care deserts where pregnancy care is difficult to find. Her vision is for a freestanding clinic that employs mostly midwives.
CHUBB: We'd have parking along the road, as well as emergency parking for mothers that were in labor and needed to pull up.
RIDDLE: But despite widespread support from the community in Augusta, she has encountered obstacle after obstacle to this effort. Chubb is originally from England. She says she never imagined that this would be her life's work.
CHUBB: Coming from the U.K., I think taking a outsider perspective on health care makes me see the amount of injustice and inequality there is in the U.S. health care system, especially with lack of patient autonomy.
RIDDLE: Patient autonomy was a big concern for Clarissa Viens (ph) when she was deciding where to give birth to her baby. She didn't want to go to a hospital. She was concerned about being pressured into interventions like a Caesarean or drugs to speed up labor. But there was no birthing center available. She's given birth at home before, but this time, things went very badly.
CLARISSA VIENS: So this is the ventilator.
RIDDLE: Viens' 17-month-old baby is hooked up to a number of machines. He suffered a brain injury after being deprived of oxygen at birth.
VIENS: If it were to alarm, you would hear, like, a whomp-whomp, whomp-whomp.
RIDDLE: He's in a diaper taking a nap on the couch. Her older children are home for the summer. During the birth, when things started to go badly at home, she did go to the hospital, but she didn't get there in time. She ended up having her baby in the car.
VIENS: It was very, very, very, very stressful. And I honestly thought that I was not going to make it. Like, it was so painful.
RIDDLE: Do you spend time thinking back, like, oh, I should've done something differently?
VIENS: Yeah, I think, you know, looking back 20/20, I may have made different decisions. But there's only one way to go, and that is forward from here.
RIDDLE: Viens says she and her husband are planning on having more children. She still doesn't want to go to the hospital for the next one, but she says she would happily go to a birth center. She wishes she could've gone to one for her son's birth.
VIENS: If we'd had a birth center, it would've changed his outcome.
RIDDLE: The are many reasons that community organizers have not been able to open a birth center here. A big one? They can't get the local hospitals to partner. Birth centers are required to have agreements with hospitals in case they need to transfer patients there. Two of the local Augusta hospitals did not return NPR's request for comment on this issue. One hospital, part of a company called Wellstar, said in a statement that they offer their own, quote, complete women's health services. Dr. Andrea Braden is an obstetrician who works in Atlanta.
ANDREA BRADEN: The obstetricians who have the really high malpractice rates end up being stuck with the liability. And that is really unfortunate, but that is where a lot of the resistance comes from.
RIDDLE: Braden is not part of this effort, but she does work with midwives. She says, in Georgia, obstetricians worry about cases exactly like Clarissa Viens' who come in when things have gone wrong. OB-GYNs are more likely to be sued than other kinds of doctors. Activist Katie Chubb has another theory about why she can't get the hospitals on board.
CHUBB: It is a lot of monopolization, putting their profits over patient needs.
RIDDLE: Again, the hospitals in Augusta did not respond to NPR's request for comment. But this kind of opposition to birthing centers from hospitals and medical associations is not uncommon. Birth centers in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Iowa have also faced resistance. Katie Chubb says she gets inquiries weekly about when this one will open in Augusta.
CHUBB: Every person that reaches out to me motivates me a little bit more to keep going.
RIDDLE: Chubb says someone has to keep fighting for more birth centers on behalf of moms and babies in Georgia, might as well be her.
Katia Riddle, NPR News, Augusta, Georgia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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