At a rate of more than two a month since the end of 2020, rural hospitals have closed or announced that they will be closing their maternity units – 124 in all by the end of 2026.
As a result, today only a little more than 40 percent of rural hospitals – most of them safety-net hospitals – continue to provide maternity services, with fewer than a third of such rural hospitals doing so in 12 states.
The hospitals blame a number of factors for this continued erosion, including inadequate private insurance and Medicaid payments and difficulty recruiting the providers they need to continue delivering such care.
The states that have seen the most rural labor and delivery units close since the end of 2020 are Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Maine, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, and Colorado.
Learn more about how rural communities are losing their access to labor and delivery services from the Becker’s Hospital Review article “124 rural hospital maternity services closed, closing in 6 years: Analysis.”