The bombshell announcement came without warning at a staff meeting last September. In the Denver suburb of Thornton, Colo., midwives, birth assistants and other staffers gathered in the conference room at Seasons Community Birth Center for their monthly all-hands meeting.
Two representatives of Elevate Women’s Health were there, too. Elevate is a healthcare group that owned Seasons, and had recently been purchased by a private equity firm.
The Elevate representatives told the assembled staff that the owners were shutting down the birth center in 30 days’ time.
“We were shocked,” said Aubre Tompkins, the center’s longtime clinical director and a certified nurse-midwife. “There were a lot of tears, anger, confusion. I can’t really put into words how I felt in that meeting. It was rough.”
Nobody expected closure; the birth center’s client base had been growing steadily. “My staff’s first reaction was, ‘What about our families who are due?’” said Tompkins. “We had 62 people who were going to have babies with us and were in their third trimester.”
Birth centers – and the midwifery model of care typically practiced in them – are more popular than ever. While births in birth centers only account for about 0.6% of all U.S. births, their number has doubled since 2010, even as the overall number of U.S. births decreased. Seasons had been open for just three years and had delivered nearly 700 babies. Birth centers themselves have seen a particular explosion of growth over the past 15 years, and now number about 400 nationwide.
As the U.S. grapples with a high maternal mortality rate and severe racial and economic health inequities, more families are looking for alternatives to the physician- and hospital-based birth that has dominated the U.S. healthcare landscape for a century.
And yet despite their popularity, many birth centers face uncertain futures, even in states with robust community support (think Massachusetts, Colorado). Birth centers in cities like Boston, Asheville and Portland have closed in recent years, their owners citing financial barriers to keeping them open.