Some call this area a birth desert. A nurse midwife is trying to change that

Jeanine Valrie Logan sat in traffic for nearly two hours while she was giving birth to her third child.

Logan was determined to have her daughter stay in a birth center, a type of small facility focused on childbirth, often staffed by midwives. But there were no birth centers near her home in Chicago’s south suburbs, so she traveled nearly 30 miles.

“I’m not an anomaly,” Logan said of the time it took her to get to the birth center. “People deserve to have that access in their own communities.”

Now, six years later, Logan is working to make that belief a reality. Logan, a certified nurse, has worked with lawmakers in recent years to expand the number of permitted birth centers in Illinois, and she is seeking permission from a state board to open a new birth center on Chicago’s South Side.

If approved, it would be the first birthing center on the South Side — an area with a largely Black population that faces challenges with pregnancy and childbirth. Black women in Illinois are significantly more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related conditions and suffer serious pregnancy or childbirth complications. Several South Side hospitals have also closed their birthing units in recent years.

“There aren’t many options for giving birth or even getting prenatal care, so the birth center in Chicago (South Side) is really going to fill a gap,” said Michelle Adeniyi, director of Maternal and Child Health Collective Impact for the March of Dimes . in Chicago, which has expressed support for the project. “We believe that all women, but especially women who are marginalized and already lack access to quality care on the Southside, deserve high-quality, safe maternity care.”

It’s a project that Logan, who says he has been working in childbirth for almost twenty years, has been focusing on since 2020.

Logan had long thought it strange that Illinois didn’t have more birth centers. She gave birth to her first two daughters at home in 2010 and 2014, under the care of midwives, because there were no birth centers in the state at the time, she said.

“I knew what it would be like to go to the hospital as a black woman, so I chose to find a midwife to have a baby at home,” Logan said, noting that racial bias in health care makes difficult experiences can mean for black women in hospitals. .

Illinois lawmakers passed a bill in 2009 allowing birth centers, but the first one didn’t open until years later. As an obstetrician, Logan felt called to action in 2020, as the death of George Floyd sparked unrest across the country and after multiple South Side hospitals closed their birthing units, in some cases to make room for more COVID-19 patients. Community hospitals across the state have closed their OB departments in recent years, often citing costs and low patient volumes.

“Our options did not expand on the south side,” Logan said. “They got smaller.”

She worked with lawmakers who passed a bill in 2021 that expanded the number of permitted birth centers in Illinois from 10 to 17 and allowed more centers to be run by entities other than hospitals or federally qualified health centers.

Logan went to work finding funding and supporters for the nonprofit birth center. To date, Logan said she has raised $1.9 million through grants and crowdsourcing, including $1.5 million from the philanthropic organization Chicago Beyond, which has also supported Logan with salary and benefits as she continues the project.

Logan recently purchased a former church building in the South Shore neighborhood to house the center. She plans to expand the center with three rooms for deliveries, three rooms for prenatal visits, staff offices and space for families. The center would also provide prenatal and other health care, as well as community classes on child birth, breastfeeding and other topics.

The center would not offer epidurals or drugs to induce labor, but it would offer drugs to help stop bleeding and local anesthesia, for example for women who need stitches after giving birth.

Only women with low-risk pregnancies would be eligible to give birth at the center. If patients encountered difficulties during labor and required more medical intervention, Advocate Trinity Hospital has agreed to accept patient transfers from the center.

The idea behind the center is to treat pregnancy and childbirth as wellness states, rather than diseased states that require intensive medical interventions, Logan said. She expects the center to deliver about 225 babies in its first year.

The Chicago South Side Birth Center could open in 2026 if the project receives state approval and raises the full $7.1 million needed. Logan, with support from Chicago Beyond, recently submitted an application to the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board for approval of the project.

Liz Dozier, founder and CEO of Chicago Beyond, called the decision to help Logan open the center a “no brainer,” given the disparities in maternal health outcomes between Black and white women, as well as the state of obstetric care at the south side. Logan is now a leader in residence at Chicago Beyond.

“It just made perfect sense to think that this birthing center was on the south side of Chicago,” Dozier said. “You don’t have to look far to see what has happened to hospitals and access to care on the South Side.”

Some even call the South Side a “native desert.” Since 2019, three South Side hospitals have closed their obstetrics units, including Jackson Park Hospital and Medical Center, St. Bernard Hospital and Health Care Center and Insight Hospital and Medical Center Chicago (formerly called Mercy Hospital). That leaves only a few hospitals with OB units serving the South Side, including the University of Chicago Medical Center, Roseland Community Hospital and Advocate Trinity Hospital.

“There are large tracts of land where there is no OB unit, forcing people to leave their neighborhoods and communities to find providers they trust and desire,” according to the birth center’s application to the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board, who must approve the project. so it can move forward. “These OB department closures are causing a tremendous lack of continuity of care for pregnant people.”

The closures occurred in an area that faced higher risks associated with childbirth and pregnancy. The population of South Shore and the surrounding neighborhood is largely Black, and in Illinois, Black women were three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related medical conditions as white women between 2018 and 2020, according to a state health department report on motherhood. morbidity and mortality. The rate at which black women developed serious pregnancy or childbirth complications was more than twice that of white women.

“It goes wide and deep when it comes to why this is happening in a country like the United States,” says Dr. Robin Jones, an obstetrician/gynecologist at the Rush University System for Health and chair of the Illinois Department of Public Health’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee.

The disparities may be caused by a number of issues, including access to health insurance, access to quality health care services and laws and policies that create an unequal distribution of resources that can leave some groups vulnerable to health risks, the state report said. Poverty, education, employment, housing, availability of child care, transportation and neighborhood safety all play a role in a woman’s ability to be healthy, the report said.

It will take a lot of funding, community programs and changes to eliminate the disparities, but Jones hopes the birth center will help.

The birth center is not intended to take the place of a hospital. But it could mean more women on the South Side get care closer to home, said Jennifer Jaume, clinical director of Chicago’s North Side Birth Center. Jaume said 20% to 30% of patients at her North Side center now travel there from the South Side.

“Birth centers should really draw from a very local community, and right now people are driving long distances to get this highly specialized care, but that’s not really the ideal model,” Jaume said. “They seek autonomy, respect and an independent birth environment where they can realize their birth dreams.”

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