Time May 7, 2024
Dr. Jesanna Cooper cried when she heard that the labor and delivery unit at Princeton Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham, Ala., would close in October 2023. She’d started delivering babies at the hospital in 2013, and had helped make it one of the best maternity care centers in the U.S., a huge accomplishment in a state with one of the highest rates of maternal mortality.
Princeton Baptist is located in a low-income part of Birmingham where birthing mothers often had serious complications. But Cooper and her partners in private practice worked with the hospital to bring in midwives, reduce the number of C-sections, and lower the amount of obstetric trauma women experienced. “We realized that we could really change...