Dr. Heather Skanes’ team at the Oasis Family Birthing Center in Birmingham, Alabama, started turning away patients this spring as state officials cracked down on alternative childbirth options.

The center had offered patients with low-risk pregnancies a place to deliver their babies outside of a hospital, where cesarean sections weren’t performed, epidurals weren’t administered and midwives took the lead. Some women labored in an inflatable aqua birthing pool, in what Skanes saw as a more supportive environment in which Black women in particular would feel more comfortable and heard.

But in March, officials with the Alabama Department of Public Health told Skanes that they considered the previously unregulated facility to be a hospital that didn’t have proper permission to be open, according to her attorneys.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the state Public Health Department on behalf of Skanes over what it has called a “de facto ban” on freestanding birth centers. The court battle is unfolding as the agency is weeks away from implementing licensing regulations for the facilities.

Alabama has an alarming record on keeping expectant and new mothers alive, with a higher share of residents dying in pregnancy and during or shortly after childbirth than almost any other state. More than a third of counties in Alabama lack hospitals with labor and delivery units or practicing obstetric providers, according to a report last year from the March of Dimes.

    • medgremlin@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Actual medical training and appropriate facilities are not high bars to clear if they want to actually do things right. The education requirements for being a midwife as opposed to a nurse midwife are appallingly lax. It’s like saying that a class taught by a high school graduate is equivalent to one taught by someone with an education degree. The person interviewed in the article is an OB/Gyn, but it doesn’t sound like her staff has any qualifications. Hell, EMTs get more education on how to actually deliver a baby and care for the mother than some midwives.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Agreed. Yet still, once upon a time the solution was ‘hey, let’s invent a hand crank chainsaw’…

        Just because a facility might not technically meet every single regulation doesn’t mean that a woman can just hold her hoo-hoo shut for an hour or more to get to a proper facility.