Maternity Ward Closures
—No Excuse!

Jan 6, 2025

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that more than one third of all hospitals in U.S. cities do not have maternity wards. This is the result of continued closures of maternity wards for more than a decade—and not just in cities but in the countryside as well.

Hospitals are closing their maternity wards because they consider them costly. They require specialists to be on hand 24/7 to attend to difficult births. At the same time, maternity wards don’t generate as much money as some other hospital departments.

In many cases, it’s working class and poor women, in cities as well as the countryside, who are losing childbirth services. The only choice women in labor then have is to go to an emergency room. But where hospitals have closed their ERs, women are forced to deliver at home, which endangers the life of the mother and the baby.

This lack of services is evident in the rates of death of mothers and infants. The rate of deaths at childbirth is especially high in the U.S., for both mother and child. The U.S. ranks 54th among all nations in infant mortality. (The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths per 1000 live births before the age of one). The U.S. is the worst among all developed, highly industrialized countries, and even worse than some underdeveloped countries.

Of course, the rate of maternal and child deaths is much higher among the working class and poor than in better-off parts of the U.S. population.

People have always celebrated the birth of a human being—it’s a celebration of life. The only people who can see a new life as a “loss” are capitalists and their managers, for whom the birth of a child is just another number in a ledger. Their first goal is to maintain and increase profit, which is a guarantee of poor quality of health care for women and children.