Maternity care is getting harder to access in Alabama, new report finds | Alabama

March of Dimes, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the health of mothers and babies, recently released its 2022 study of maternity care deserts across the United States. The report: Nowhere to go shows more needs to be done to save the lives of mothers and babies in Alabama.

“We’re seeing an increase in the number of counties that don’t have adequate access to care,” said Honour McDaniel. McDaniel is the director of Maternal Infant Health for the March of Dimes Alabama Market.

During an interview with WAAY 31 Anchor, Nakell Williams, McDaniel explained some parts of our region is equipped and provides adequate access to care, but other parts of the region are in desperate need of better services. “The further and further out you go from Madison County, Limestone, Blount, and Cullman you’re going to have less providers for those women. Then you get all the way over to Florence area and you will have very little,” McDaniel explained.”

According to the report, areas where there’s low or no access, affect up to 6.9 million women and close to 500-thousand births across the United States. This includes a five percent increase in counties that have less maternity access since 2020.

According to the Alabama Department of Health, the state has the third-highest maternal mortality rate in the nation.

The March of Dimes shows many counties in dire need of improvement in Alabama. North Alabama counties including Lawrence and Franklin are considered maternity care deserts.

“So it’s going take longer for women to get to there. That means that they’re going to have to take off work for longer and just this kind of rippling effect that’s going to affect care moms can receive,” she said.

Limestone and Colbert counties are considered to have low access.

Counties including Madison, Jackson and DeKalb currently adequately provide access to care for women according the report.

McDaniel says the state needs to focus on monitoring and reporting to better understand the parts of the state that need specific services.

“We need to look more into aligning our legislation around the needs for moms to have more infrastructure around getting care,” McDaniel explained.

Honour said she understands it may not be possible to build a hospital in every county, more attention should be placed on areas where hospitals have closed.

“We’ve had several hospital closures. We should be looking at the level of burnout with our providers. We should be looking at different ways that we can increase the networks that women can get to and get access to providers,” she explained.

African American women have a more difficult time accessing maternal care.

“We see a large proportion of our country with higher rates of Black women having lower access to care, higher maternal mortality rates, higher infant mortality rates, and we see it almost two times the amount of African American and black families have preterm births, which means babies were born too soon,” McDaniel said.

“Congress needs to provide irrefutable data about the maternity health crisis so that we can build off of this and show this is an issue in our country, that it’s an issue in our state,” McDaniel added.

See full report below.