One woman fights to open a birth center, but obstacles are everywhere : Shots
Katie Chubb, a community organizer, is held in an empty lot in Augusta, Georgia, where she has been trying to open a birth center for six years. She says that the lack of cooperation of local hospitals was a main obstacle.
Kendrick Brinson / For NPR
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Kendrick Brinson / For NPR
Standing in front of an empty batch an afternoon in the heat of Georgia, Katie Chubb has made gestures where she has been trying to open a birth center for six years.
“We would have a parking lot along the road,” she said, describing her vision of a place that would offer a more family alternative to a birth in the hospital.
CHUBB is a community organizer in a state with some of the highest maternity and infant mortality rates in the country. She says that a birth center is seriously necessary here – Augusta, in Georgia, is surrounded by maternal health care deserts, where pregnancy care can be difficult to find and that few alternatives exist outside hospitals.
His vision concerns an independent clinic which mainly uses midwives and works in partnership with obstetricians.
But despite generalized community support and even investment offers, Chubb encountered an obstacle after an obstacle to its mission to offer safer birth options to women.
Birth in the United States can be dangerous
The Trump administration called on Americans to have more children. But defenders have warned for years that maternal and infantile mortality rates are raised in the United States, showing how dangerous birth can be dangerous. Mistrust of medical institutions and hospitals also develops across the country. And some people want more options.
When Clarissa Come was pregnant, she didn’t want to have her baby in the hospital. She feared that doctors pressure in a cesarean or medication to speed up work. Come has had births prior to the house and in a birth center in Alaska, where she lived. “You are better in a birth center,” says Come. “The baby is better because they are more relaxed at birth. They immediately put the skin to the skin. They do not get lively lights,” she said.
Without a similar center available in Augusta, Come decided to give birth at home. When things started to happen, she went to the hospital, but it was too late.
Her baby was born in the car.
During his birth, she says, he experienced a prolapse of cord – which deprives the brain of the baby of oxygen – and his son underwent a brain injury.
He returned from the hospital with a fan and a food tube. Doctors still assess their diagnosis at 18 months, explains Come.
Retrospectively, she said, she would have made different decisions. “But there is only one way to proceed and it is forward from here.” She and her husband plan to have more children, and come and say that she still does not want to go to the hospital for the next one. She would gladly go to a birth center and want her to have gone to one for the birth of her son.
“If we had had a birth center, it would have changed its result,” said Come.
Birth centers still rare in the United States
There are around 400 birth centers in the United States in more than 40 states, according to the American Association of Birth Centers. Although still relatively rare, demand has increased across the country in recent years for these centers, which can provide a safe alternative to hospitals, for low -risk pregnancies.
Katie Chubb wanted to find a birth center when she was pregnant, but there was not nearby. So she led more than two hours to get her son. Realizing the need, she trained her own organization, obtained an ambulance transfer agreement, recruited a doctor to associate with her and even went so far as to successfully plead a change in law of Georgia, allowing birth centers to open without the authorization of local hospitals.
However, birth centers require partnerships with hospitals and obstetricians in order to transfer patients if necessary.
Hospitals will not cooperate.
Chubb says hospitals do not want to abandon potential income by abandoning patients at a birth center. “They put their profits on the needs of patients,” she said.
None of Augusta’s three hospitals responded to interview requests, although a hospital – part of the largest Wellstar health system – published a statement by email that said they offer their own “complete women’s health services”.
Augusta is not the only community to fight with local hospitals. Similar difficulties in opening birth centers have played in states such as Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Iowa.
Another reason for resistance is the concern of professional fault. Obstetricians are more likely to be prosecuted than other types of specialists, explains Andrea Braden, an obstetrician who works in Atlanta with midwives and hospitals.
“It is really regrettable, but it is from there that a large part of the resistance comes from,” she said. Braden is not involved in the effort to open a birth center in Augusta.
She says that obstetricians often do not want to associate with midwives for fear of being given to patients who are already in crisis and who could lead to a professional fault costume. “Obstetricians who have very high professional fault rates end up being trapped with responsibility,” she said. The American Medical Association claims that the OB-GYNS make an average of 162 claims for responsibility for all 100 doctors.
High -risk pregnancies are generally not considered to be good candidates for birth center deliveries.
For black women, a unique set of concerns
Jonquette Sanders-White had experienced healthy pregnancies, until the birth of his fourth child. After birth, she underwent a postpartum hemorrhage, one of the main causes of maternal mortality.
Sanders-White Family
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Sanders-White Family
Giving birth is even more dangerous for black women, who are three times more likely to die from the causes related to pregnancy than white women, according to the CDC. The disparity has worsened in recent years.
Jonquette Sanders-White went to the hospital two years ago in work with its fourth baby. The baby was fine, but Sanders-White had both a cesarean and a hysterectomy. A few hours after surgery, she recalls, her belly “was more distended by the second”.
She was hemorrhage. The doctors and nurses had missed it. Postpartum hemorrhage is one of the main causes of maternal mortality.
“All that I remember,” she recalls, “is that nurses and doctors rush into my room and they scream and cry and say:” She crashes. She crashes, she dies. She is dying! “”
Her husband, Treston White, remembers that a nurse came to tell her “it was not going well” and “being ready to say goodbye”.
White says he did not believe in the nurse and rather chose to pray. He didn’t think God would take his wife. “I had no room for doubt,” he said.
Although Sander-White has done so, she now pursues the hospital and the practice of surgeons who operated it. The complaint alleys that she still has serious complications of the event two years later. NPR contacted lawyers for doctors and hospital and has not heard. The medical records included in the legal complaint show that it bleeds on the day of birth.
Reflecting on the event, Sanders-White says that one of the many overwhelming things that day was that she never interacted with a member of Color staff.
“I think if I was another race, they would have been proactive,” she said. “A little faster to react in relation to waiting for me to crush and die.”
Sanders-White says that his experience has shown him that hospitals are not necessarily the safest place. She thinks that a more holistic birth worker would have been more attentive to his needs and his quasi-display. “We absolutely need options outside hospitals,” she said. “My eyes are open now.”
These are stories like this one that motivates Katie Chubb to continue fighting for her birth center. She says she gets weekly calls from people who wondered when it is open.
Chubb grew up in the United Kingdom, where births assisted by midwives are more common. She moved to Augusta after meeting her husband on vacation in the United States, she says that she never imagined that it would be the work of her life, but says that she thinks that her external point of view helps. “It shows me the amount of injustice and inequality there is in the American health system,” she said.
“Especially with the lack of autonomy of patients” and the choices.
