Women in Deep East Texas drive over an hour to give birth after the last obstetrics unit in the area closed in 2019. But if closing the unit was hard, reopening it is proving nearly impossible.
Like many postpartum complications, hemorrhage doesn’t always happen immediately. Nearly a third of maternal deaths occur more than a month after childbirth, according to“Thank God I was still at the hospital because if I would have made it home and did that, and had to drive all the way to Lufkin, I probably would not be here right now,” Williams said. “I would have lost so much blood just on the drive.
Mary Goodwin, director of nursing for Jasper Memorial Hospital, said the hospital is equipped to deliver babies and provide lifesaving care in the emergency room. But its priority is serving the community as it exists today. Without that, it’s hard to know what the future of Jasper looks like. This is the existential question facing rural communities across Texas as they fight to stave off extinction: Without a place to give birth, what’s left but to die?
There is some hope on the horizon. The Temple Foundation is helping fund three medical residency programs in East Texas, hoping to flood the region with new doctors. McMurry is optimistic about the long-term future of obstetrics in Jasper. But he knows none of these efforts, no matter how successful, will help this generation of pregnant women.
“It will probably, unfortunately, never get back to where it was previous to the pandemic,” said John Hawkins, THA president and CEO. “Right now, we’re just focusing on trying to stabilize the system.”Texas has money: a $27 billion surplus this legislative session. Even a sliver of that pie would help maintain and possibly restore health care services to desperate regions, rural health advocates say.
On the recently and radically redrawn reproductive health care map, Deep East Texas has ended up particularly isolated. It’s surrounded by abortion bans in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma; the nearest abortion clinic is nine hours away, in Wichita, Kansas.
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