This Is What Happens When You Don't Listen to Women and Doctors

Laurens County is becoming a maternal healthcare desert

So for the first time in over 20 years, the South Carolina legislature is being called back by the Governor because they weren’t able to do important things like agree on a budget or figure out exactly how best to make maternal health outcomes worse for women in the state. Vowing they won’t quit until they ban abortion (there has been a back and forth about whether to ban abortion at conception (the House) or at six weeks (the Senate)), Trey Walker, Governor McMaster’s chief of staff, proudly posted this on Twitter:

Nary a woman (or OBGYN) to be seen!

Here’s the thing, y’all. These bans, or the potential for them, are already driving OBGYNs out of states that turn them into potential felons. In Laurens County, where I teach, the Prisma hospital system abruptly closed the labor and delivery unit at the local hospital. I interviewed someone familiar with the hospital and there were four OBGYNs on staff there, then in the last six months they were down to two. Recently one of the two announced they’d be leaving in June, leaving the county with only one OBGYN.

What this means for women in Laurens County is truly horrifying. The closure of the unit was so abrupt that staff had only four days of notice before it closed on May 6^th. Pregnant women who arrive at the hospital now will either be treated in the ER or transported to the nearest hospital in Greenville, 40-45 minutes away by ambulance.

The nurses on the labor and delivery unit are being relocated or offered severance packages, so there will be no nurses on staff with training in neonatal resuscitation until the ER staff is trained in these areas at the end of the month, leaving a weeks-long gap in training and expertise.

I’m no medical expert, but I have had two high risk pregnancies, so I know what is at stake if you don’t have timely access to quality care. Because this unit is now closed (apparently temporarily, but I’m not sure why they’d be offering severance packages if they expect it to be up and running soon?), women in the entire county will now be almost an hour away from a place they can safely deliver. If they show up in the emergency room over 8 cm, they won’t be able to transport them, and could be forced to deliver in the emergency room.

I have, unfortunately, been to the ER in Laurens County, when my mom was really sick with Covid. I’m so grateful for what the doctors and nurses did to stabilize her and get her back on her feet, but the ER is not a comfortable place. They only have 16 beds, and two or three of them are regularly occupied by patients who need social work referrals to get them into safe places. Patients awaiting these referrals sometimes are forced to live in the ER for months while the staff try to care for them, further reducing the beds available to critical patients.

I can’t imagine being forced to deliver in an ER, where any number of very stressful emergencies or psych patient episodes could be happening. After delivery, there will be no place for the mother or baby to recover—they will be transported to another hospital. Imagine giving birth and then being forced to transfer for recovery. Because only one patient can travel in an ambulance at a given time, this means that if a women and her newborn are transferred out of Laurens County by ambulance and not by car, then the newborn will be transported alone, without the mother, for almost an hour. I want to cry even imagining that scenario.

This is assuming all goes well, and both mother and baby survive the birth. Imagine needing an emergency c-section, like I did. There is a helicopter ambulance now in Laurens County, as of this year, but women in labor can’t use it. The only option for emergency transport is by ambulance, and the hospital will have to wait for an ambulance to drive down from Greenville, because Laurens County does not have one in house.

So, because the hospital system is losing OBGYNs, women and babies in Laurens County face much worse healthcare options: minimum of 80 minutes to wait for emergency transport out of the county, no nurses in the ER currently with neonatal resuscitation training, no access to emergency surgery to say, keep a woman with an ectopic pregnancy from bleeding out. I’m not sure what the hospital administration was thinking, to make these decisions so suddenly, but women’s lives are at stake. This is the future in South Carolina if we continue to refuse Medicaid expansion, and if we turn our healthcare professionals into felons. They’ll leave, and we’ll be left with this.