As hospitals cut back on labor and delivery units, expecting parents eye birthing centers
CHASKA, Minn. — As if giving birth wasn't stressful enough.
"It's the mom and the baby that run the show," Emily Birdsall, a mom of four, asserted to WCCO Investigates. "You want to have a birth when the doctor is available, so they schedule you, but you're not ready to give birth. That's just not the way it's supposed to go."
Birdsall is among a growing population of women who are foregoing the traditional labor and delivery unit in a hospital and are instead giving birth in centers run by midwives.
Birdsall's youngest, Erik, was born a few months ago at New Birth Wellness Center in Chaska.
"In my head I thought Amish people had home births and maybe next to them, their neighbors went to the birth centers," she quipped. "The more women that I talked to that had been coming to a birth center, I noticed it was more regular and they were normal people. Why can't this be me?"
There are a variety of reasons why expectant mothers are choosing birth centers, including wanting a more natural experience without medical interventions.
For Birdsall, however, she said the decision was kind of made for her: there were cutbacks at her hospital.
"It was whoa - where did everybody go?" She recalled. "Having a baby is supposed to be something relatively easy for most women. Why was there the turnover rate?"
Sara Barbosa and Jennifer Hall, the founders and co-owners of New Birth, told WCCO Investigates they've been inundated with calls from women forced to look elsewhere from their local hospital.
"For birth centers, we'll take them as far as they want to come to us," Barbosa explained. "But there are still complications that come with birth. You can plan and plan and plan, and sometimes we still need that higher level of care."
Several hospitals in Minnesota cut labor and delivery services
A WCCO investigation found that nearly 20 hospitals in Minnesota have either cut or relocated services since 2021. Many of those cutbacks affected labor and delivery: Cambridge Medical Center, Essential Health-Fosston, Granite Falls Health Center, Mayo Health New Prague, Olivia Hospital, and Regina Hospital.
WCCO Investigates reached out to each hospital and its affiliated health system for comment. They all declined and instead directed us to the Minnesota Hospital Association.
The association's finance director, Joe Schindler, said hospitals are being forced to sacrifice labor and delivery units for the hospital to remain financially viable.
"They're closing these services just to keep the doors open for the emergency room and other inpatient and outpatient care," he said. "It's a last resort, it's an unwanted last resort, but labor and delivery, skilled nursing facilities, mental health services, are all being considered."
What makes labor and delivery so expensive, Schinder added, is the special staff and 24-hour schedule it always requires.
"Somebody comes in for a normal delivery and suddenly a C-section has to be performed. Within 20 minutes you have to have a team ready to go with anesthesiology and everybody else to safely deliver that child," he said.
The hardest hit areas are in rural Minnesota, with just 48 out of 98 rural hospitals now providing obstetric services, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. The median drive time to get to one of those hospitals, moreover, is 31 minutes.
The trends are even worse across the United States: only 43% of rural hospitals nationally have L&D units, with a median drive time of 36 minutes for patients.
For Birdsall, she said she worries all the changes could dissuade women from having kids in the future, but she's grateful she was able to find a better option for her growing family.
"It was a total shift. A total mind shift," she said.
