10/09/2026
The fight to protect perinatal and reproductive populations is not isolated and is deeply interconnected with the broader struggles facing Black communities in Chicago and across the nation.
With yet another hospital on the South Side of Chicago eliminating their labor and delivery services this creates a severe maternal care desert with only two institutions left delivering babies for a dense population of nearly 300,000 reproductive age persons in the region alone.
As a maternal health strategist, my immediate focus shifts heavily to emergency department routing protocols, expanding non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) access, and scaling community-based birth workers to mitigate travel risks imposed on patients. The truth is that the other hospital emergency rooms will function as transit funnels rather than care destinations for perinatal needs causing strains to emergency medical services.
Perinatal needs ranging from sudden contractions and decreased fetal movement to severe postpartum blood pressure spikes operate on a clinical timeline of minutes, not days. Critical interventions to restructure the pre-encounter workflow and leverage automated validation reduces patient wait times for patients now forced to travel 15-20 miles for perinatal care.
