Settling in for the long-haul
One of our wonderful birth center families after a long, and victorious labor.
Sorry guys, it is always a birth analogy, so prepare yourself.
Sometimes, when you are in labor with steady contractions, working hard to cope with each wave, you start to wonder if it will ever be over. Will this baby ever come out? Maybe you want a cervical check and find out you aren’t as far along as you hoped you would be (bee-tee-dubs, cervical exams won’t ever tell you where you’ve been or where you’re going, but just give us a snapshot of where things are in that moment, but more on that later).
You try a position for a while and it works, until it doesn’t, and then you find a new thing.
And on you go until that blessed moment when we all hear tiny lungs fill with air and cry out for the first time.
But before then, sometimes you want to pack up and go home, press the pause button, give up. But, as all midwives will tell you from their wisdom: the only way through is through.
Now back to us, we have opened, we are licensed, we have obtained our national accreditation via CABC (which is a big deal, ahthankyouverymuch), our facility is beautiful, our providers are awesome, we’ve welcomed close to 200 babies. We’ve FOUGHT for better regulations, better insurance contracts, better rights, better support. We’ve won a lot of those fights and made huge progress.
Hold up, lemme edit that real quick: we are fighting, present-tense. Every time we experience a victory, we realize that there is still so, so much work to be done. It’s like getting through a contraction and realizing that the baby isn’t here yet, and you’re going to have to do it again.
So here’s where we are at: 8cm, starting to feel like we need to push, and about to deliver this 11-pound toddler-baby of long-term sustainability. We’ve realized, just like when you are in labor and reach out for that hand to squeeze and steady, calm eyes to look into, that we need your help.
Right now birth centers everywhere are having a group-realization: we can make a huge dent in the maternal health crisis, but we have one, huge barrier to our success: fair and sustainable insurance contracts.
Here’s the deal: we offer the exact same care for low-risk, uncomplicated birth as a hospital. And we are doing it with significantly better outcomes (our c-section rate is <6% compared to 27%, a ~10% epidural rate compared to the national average of 85%, fewer NICU admits, fewer preterm births, better client satisfaction, etc). Notwithstanding the epic cost-savings that this presents to insurers, they are reimbursing us at a fraction of the rate for uncomplicated, vaginal birth.
So we started pushing back on this and asking why they’re paying us less for the same services with better outcomes. Why are they reimbursing us at unsustainable rates when we are meeting the international standards set by the CDC, the NIH, and the WHO when we’re not doing this as a nation? Nobody has a good answer. So we’re asking them to change. The state insurance commissioner agrees, and has offered us a meeting with each of the 12 insurers with a presence in Oregon. We meet in about three weeks.
We have the data. Man, we have so much data. But we need you. The most compelling information at the end of the day is how you feel about your care. Even if you didn’t choose a birth center, you know how important it is that people have choices.
Will you send us your stories? Tell us what difference having a midwife made to you. Tell us why Astoria and NW Oregon and SW Washington need to have access to a birth center. Tell us what you would do if we didn’t exist. Send pictures! We will compile all of these stories and bring them with us when we go to Salem. We’ll share them on social (please don’t share anything you don’t want publicly known and let us know if you want your initials left out).
You can send these to us via instagram, facebook, your EHR, or email them to hello@astoriabirthcenter.com. Birth centers all over Oregon are doing this so we can show the decision makers what this means to you.
Either way, we’re going to fight for this, and we will deliver this baby. It will result in long-term sustainability and increased access to birth centers everywhere. But we’ll do so much better with your help.
Onward, y’all.