America Is Cutting Maternal Care at Home and Abroad—and Mothers on Both Sides Are Paying for It

Across rural America, hospitals are shutting down the units where babies are born. Across Africa, the clinics that American aid kept running are losing midwives, blood banks, and basic supplies. The common thread is federal funding that has disappeared in the past year.

In western Wisconsin, seven labor and delivery units closed in roughly five years, five of them in rural towns. Women who used to drive 30 minutes to give birth now drive for hours, and one obstetrician told the paper about a patient pregnant with twins who drove four hours round-trip through the night because the nearest hospital was too far to risk waiting.

West Virginia mothers described similar stories: an hour-and-a-half drive to the next unit, a two-night hotel stay waiting for a bed, and a woman who struggled to afford gas just to get to her appointments.

Rural obstetrics has been underfunded for years. Medicaid covered 41 percent of U.S. births in 2022, but its reimbursement rates have never been high enough to keep a rural birth unit profitable on their own. That was the situation before the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed July 4, 2025, which cuts $911 billion from Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program over ten years. Coverage losses don't begin until January 2027, but hospitals are already closing in anticipation. Protect Our Care, which tracks closures, counts nearly 30 maternity wards shut down since the bill passed, and the National Rural Health Association warns that closures could accelerate as the strain grows.

The United States was already losing more mothers than any comparable country, with 22.3 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022 and nearly 50 per 100,000 for Black women. Those numbers are from before the cuts take effect.

The effects overseas are just as grim. After the Trump administration shut down USAID, South Sudan saw its American aid cut by more than 40 percent in 2025. One of the five midwives serving an entire state said her hospital has recorded five maternal deaths this year, including a woman who died of hemorrhage after a C-section because the blood bank no longer runs around the clock. Staff have gone seven months without pay. A 2026 study modeling the USAID withdrawal across six West and Central African countries projected maternal deaths could rise by as much as 45 percent, and another study estimates the loss of contraceptive care alone could cause more than 8,000 additional maternal deaths.

The World Health Organization says the world is short at least 900,000 midwives. The United States used to help close that gap. Today it is widening it, while mothers in its own rural counties face longer drives to fewer hospitals.

What happens next depends on two things: whether Congress revisits the Medicaid cuts before they phase in, and whether foreign aid funding is restored at anything close to prior levels. For now, neither is on the table.

A mother should not have to drive two hours in the dark to find out whether she is in labor, and a midwife in South Sudan should not have to go door to door looking for blood because the bank that American aid once funded has gone quiet. Caring for mothers, here and abroad, should be a top priority for anyone who claims to protect American families. A strong family starts with a mother who survives childbirth, and a pro-life nation is one that keeps its maternity wards open and its promises to the vulnerable overseas.