Akilah Johnson wrote this past weekend in the Washington Post under the headline, "In rural America, the crisis of disappearing reproductive care steals lives." The dateline is Bangor, Maine, and an excerpt follows:
All the reasons people in this rural region seek reproductive care — and the barriers they must overcome in accessing it — were on full display from the moment the first patient stepped into this clinic nestled amid towering evergreens.
There was the 32-year-old struggling to pay out of pocket for a medication abortion because her credit card wouldn’t go through. A first-time patient who was referred to the Mabel Wadsworth Center — more than an hour from home — because her provider wasn’t sure how best to treat her disabling premenstrual syndrome. Another woman who developed hypertension while pregnant arrived to have her blood pressure checked. And a couple was there for their first prenatal visit.
The nation is in a maternal mortality and morbidity crisis that grows year after year and is particularly acute in rural communities, where it is normal for the nearest hospital to be a long drive away and poverty is too often prevalent.
Each year, tens of thousands of people experience unexpected pregnancy complications — cardiovascular issues, hypertension, diabetes — and about 700 die, making pregnancy and childbirth among the leading causes of death for teenage girls and women 15 to 44 years old. Black women are three times as likely to die as a result of pregnancy as White women, and Native American women are more than twice as likely to die, disparities that persist regardless of income, education and other socioeconomic factors.
Prior posts on this topic (based mostly on prior mainstream media reports) are here.
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