In a state with high maternal mortality, a woman fights to open a birth center : NPR

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The Trump administration wants the Americans to have more children, but defenders have been warning for years that maternal and infant mortality rates are raised in the United States Katia Riddle NPR brings us a history on a woman in Georgia who is on a mission to make pregnancy and birth more for families in her community.

Katia Riddle, Byline: Standing in the heat of Georgia one afternoon, Katie Chubb is making an empty lot. It was there that she has been trying to open a birth center for six years.

Katie Chubb: We are going to have a self -supporting birth center here. It would be a floor.

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 seriously necessary. The community is surrounded by maternal health care deserts where pregnancy treatments are difficult to find. His vision concerns an independent clinic which mainly uses midwives.

Chubb: We would have a parking lot along the road, as well as an emergency parking for mothers who were in work and had to stop.

Riddle: But despite a broad support from the community in Augusta, she encountered an obstacle after an obstacle to this effort. Chubb is from England. She says that she never imagined that it would be the work of her life.

CHUBB: Coming from the United Kingdom, I think that taking an external perspective on health care shows me the amount of injustice and inequality in the American health care system, in particular with the lack of autonomy of patients.

Riddle: Patient autonomy was a great concern for Clarissa Come (pH) when she decided to give birth to her baby. She didn’t want to go to the hospital. She was concerned about pressure in interventions such as a cesarean or medication to speed up work. But there was no birth center available. She has already gave birth at home, but this time, things went very badly.

Clarissa comes: So it’s the fan.

Riddle: The 17 -month -old baby is connected to a number of machines. He suffered a brain injury after being deprived of oxygen at birth.

Come: if it was going to be alarmed, you will hear, like, a Whomp-Whomp, Whomp-Whomp.

Riddle: He is in a layer taking a nap on the sofa. Her older children are at home for the summer. During the birth, when things started to go to the house, she went to the hospital, but she did not get there on time. She ended up having her baby in the car.

Come: it was very, very, very stressful. And I honestly thought that I was not going to do it. Like it was so painful.

Riddle: Spend time to think, like, oh, I should have done something differently?

Come: yes, I think, you know, looking back at 20/20, I may have made different decisions. But there is only one way to go, and this is forward from here.

Riddle: Come say that she and her husband plan to have more children. She still does not want to go to the hospital for the next, but she says that she would gladly go to a birth center. She wants her to have gone to one for the birth of her son.

Come: if we had a birth center, it would have changed its result.

Riddle: These are many reasons why the community organizers have not been able to open a birth center here. A big one? They cannot make local hospitals combine. Birth centers must have agreements with hospitals in case they have to transfer patients there. Two of the local hospitals of Augusta did not return the request for NPR comments on this issue. A hospital, which is 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: Obstetricians who have really high professional misconduct rates end up being stuck with responsibility. And it’s really unfortunate, but that’s where a large part of the resistance comes from.

Riddle: Braden is not part of this effort, but she works with midwives. She says that in Georgia, the obstetricians are concerned about cases exactly like the coming from Clarissa come who come when things went wrong. Ob-gyn are more likely to be prosecuted than other types of doctors. Activist Katie Chubb has another theory on the reasons why she cannot put hospitals on board.

CHUBB: It’s a lot of monopolization, by putting their benefits on the needs of patients.

Riddle: Again, Augusta hospitals did not respond to the request for NPR comments. But this type of opposition to the delivery centers of hospitals and medical associations is not uncommon. Birth centers in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Iowa also faced resistance. Katie Chubb says that she receives requests for information every week at the time when he is opening up to Augusta.

Chubb: Each person who contacts me motivates me a little more to continue.

Riddle: Chubb says that someone must continue to fight for more birth centers in the name of moms and babies in Georgia, could just as easily be her.

Katia Riddle, NPR News, Augusta, Georgia.

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