Across West Texas, communities are grappling with a shortage of obstetric providers, meaning some expecting mothers are driving hours for care.
A recent study found that more than two-thirds of counties across West Texas are maternal deserts, meaning they have no birth centers offering obstetric care.
Taylor County technically isn’t one of them. Taylor County has a hospital, with labor and delivery services. And it has practicing Obstetric providers. Still, pregnant women here are struggling to find care.
22-year-old Courtney Newell is a military wife and a second-time mom. When she found out she was pregnant with her youngest child, she expected that finding prenatal care in Abilene would be easy. Newell delivered her first child in Idaho and had no problem finding an OB.
“I literally had no issue at all. I was, when I found out I was pregnant, I just looked up OBGYns in my area, and I called the hospital that I wanted to deliver at. And they gave me a list of like 20 to 30 if I preferred male or females. They just were very accommodating.”
But in Abilene, Newell spent almost eight hours on the phone, trying to find a provider who was taking new patients.
“I was definitely really stressed. I was literally crying on my kitchen floor. Obviously, we need OBGYN care. And it's frustrating because Women want to have so much say, we want to have a lot of say over like our pregnancy and our providers. And when you literally have no options, so you just have to go with the one person that's open, it's, Kind of feels like you don't have any control over that situation obv”
Holly Joiner is the executive director at Pregnancy Resources of Abilene, and she sees moms every day who are struggling to find prenatal care.
"It's difficult right now, and so we will have up to 120 positive pregnancy tests a month, and out of those pregnancy tests, about 50 to 80 percent cannot get in to see a doctor for at least three months, sometimes six months. Some of those moms are not going to get any care in Abilene, and so we are sending some of our moms to Sweetwater, San Angelo, and as far as Fort Worth to get prenatal care.”
Joiner says Pregnancy Resources of Abilene had a record-breaking month in July in terms of services provided.
That trend reflects the need created by a shrinking number of doctors providing maternal care.
Dr. Whitney Mascorro has watched the steady decline of fellow O-Bs in Abilene over her two decades in practice here.
"I think when I first came here about 20 years ago there were in general between 12 to 14 providers providing obstetric care in Abilene, both at the north side and the south side combined. Currently there are seven of us and we are all really functioning at our top capacity for being able to take care of women safely.”
Mascorro says that being an obstetrician is a hard job — with overnight deliveries, the challenge of building trust with patients, and, for some physicians, a difficult work-life balance. She says those demands can make recruiting new physicians more challenging.
This shortage — and struggle to recruit — isn't unique to Abilene. John Henderson is the CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals. He says communities across Texas are facing many of the same challenges.
"It's hard to attract clinicians to rural communities. It’s a workforce issue, not just OBGYN or family medicine but nurses. Historically, maternity care is not a profitable — it’s essential, but it's not profitable. So some rural hospitals have stopped providing the service because of the financial strain it puts on operations."
Henderson says those workforce shortages and financial pressures have forced some Texas hospitals to close labor and delivery units altogether.
Dr. Robert Wiley is the chief medical officer at Hendrick Health, a health system that serves patients from Abilene and 18 surrounding counties, many of which have no women's health care at all.
"I think the biggest challenge we have right now is just access... we serve a region of 400,000 plus people across 18 counties... all those counties do not have women's health. It’s basically a maternal desert — so it’s hard to get care. In addition, the access is limited by the number of OB doctors we have and people who provide women’s healthcare. Presently we have about six OB doctors who deliver babies, and we could use anywhere from two to three times that number."
Wiley says the hospital is actively recruiting obstetric providers and developing a certified nurse-midwife program to help meet growing demand across the region.