More than half of the rural counties in the United States don’t have a local hospital with a maternity ward.

According to the Huffington Post, a Carolina Public Press report that detailed how maternity wards are closing all across the rural South.

But why is this happening? And can anything help ease the pain of this trend?

Why rural maternity wards are disappearing

Hospitals have budgets, and unfortunately, childbirth and newborn care is not in the budget for some rural hospitals, says Risa Klein, Manhattan midwife/CNM. So, when a hospital forgoes providing maternity care, a few things happen.

Emergency rooms become make-shift labor and delivery rooms, which is problematic if the mother or fetus have a medical challenge. “The danger is that women may have high risk medical conditions, and delay their prenatal care due to lack of any maternity health care in their towns,” says Klein. “This poses challenges for the well-being of the growing fetus because blood work and ultrasonography could also be delayed.”

With maternity departments missing from local hospitals, women may have to travel far to get to a hospital or birth care provider. This becomes a burden physically, emotionally, and financially.

Improving medical care

Education and technology could improve how women in rural communities receive maternity care.

Education and community outreach

Klein says if more women had positive, influential role models via community and local hospital outreach (even if the local hospital doesn’t have a maternity ward), they’d have the resources to help get the medical care they need. Additionally, education concerning pre-conception visits and education would help women prepare for pregnancy.

These meetings could lower other risk factors and keep women healthy from the start. “For example, taking prenatal vitamins three months before a woman starts trying to get pregnant; eliminating alcohol and smoking; seeing a health care provider to discuss medications and how those meds may impact pregnancy… All these decisions can create a healthier pregnancy,” adds Klein.

Technology

Technology allows OB/GYNs to better serve pregnant women in large cities and in rural communities. But telemedicine can specifically help women in rural areas see a medical professional when time is tight.

For example, even though there might not be specialist in a woman’s rural town, a cell phone could connect a patient to a virtual doctor who specializes in a patient’s specific type of pregnancy, says Dr. Jacqueline Darna NMD, CEO, and medical inventor of NoMo Nausea.

One up-and-coming tele-medical service is Babyscripts. The online service is a mobile, clinical tool that helps OB/GYNs remotely monitor their pregnant patients’ progress and health.

The service provides patients with a “Mommy Kit” that has an FDA-approved WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure cuff and weight scale. The app directs patients to take their blood pressure and weigh-in regularly so that issues, such as high blood pressure or too much weight gain, can be identified earlier, not just when a woman shows up for her monthly prenatal appointment. Babyscripts also monitors patient related data and communicates exceptional data points on a real-time basis. It also deploys a personalized approach to specific types of patients based on their conditions and needs (depression, diabetes, etc.).

Technology can’t change everything

While technology is certainly moving medicine forward, it can’t help in the case  of an emergency. One can only hope that with time, and improved health care, all hospitals will have a functioning maternity ward.

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Earlier this summer, Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Fund and the Drake Law School united with the USDA to support a subset of the rural population that has often found itself erased: lesbian farmers.

Just one of a series of events designed to reach queer farmers and other LGBT people in rural areas, the event, which took place mid-August, inadvertently drew the nation’s attention to the incredible women working in agriculture today.

The event, for which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was the keynote speaker, originally sought to help LGBT people to sign up for USDA programs like food stamps and housing loans, with “programs and services that exist to protect, promote, and strengthen LGBT members of rural communities,” according to a pamphlet provided by the USDA.

The summit sought to support the members of this subset of the rural community, who are often unaware that they have a right to these services.

“Contrary to widely held myths that the LGBT community is largely living in affluent metropolitan areas, studies show a very different and more realistic picture of the LGBT community,” the USDA said. “For a number of reasons, many people in the LGBT community choose to live, work, and raise their families in the rural communities that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proud to serve.”

When he got wind of the summit, right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh came back with a mind-boggling response, calling the program an “attack” on what he has deemed the last conservative bastion: rural America.

“Here comes the Obama regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up,” Limbaugh ranted on the air. “I’m like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers. I never knew that lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing. I never knew it. … The objective here is to attack rural states.”

But Limbaugh’s view of rural areas is completely misguided, according to NBC News. Setting aside for a moment that most modern farmers have long since forgone the horse and plow, the USDA is not handing out subsidies to queer farmers, but rather guiding them toward programs already in existence to which they have a right. And to top it all off, no one is encouraging LGBT people to move to rural areas: they are already there.

“We have this perception that LGBT people leave rural areas and I think that’s not actually true,” said Naomi Goldberg, policy director for the Movement Advancement Project and a speaker at the Iowa LGBT Rural Summit. “Breaking the stereotype that LGBT people don’t live outside of cities is really important.”

Her research shows that 96 out of 99 Iowa counties are home to gay couples who are raising children. The largest proportional increase in same-sex couples in the 2000 census occurred in rural areas.

Limbaugh’s narrow view of the truth has set off an assortment of tributes to lesbian farmers, from a musical theater response created by Kathryn Lounsbery to “America Needs Lesbian Farmers” t-shirts.

Inadvertently, his tirade brought increased visibility, not only to this event, but to rural members of the LGBT community, bringing about the very reality that Limbaugh sought to criticize: members of the LGBT community who thought that the door to rural living was closed to them can now see the truth.

“It’s not just about acknowledging LGBT farmers,” Professor Colin R. Johnson, author of “Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America,” told NBC. “Its also about communicating to a generation of rural youth … of saying to people who are demonstrably leaving, that you can remain. You can remain and not be boxed into a kind of way of life before you have the opportunity to shape it.”

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