Regional Maternal Deserts

Recorded:
Oct 2024
Speaker
Dr. Liz Thomason
Duration
00:01:40
AUDIO CLIP
TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Liz Thomason: I think you’re going to see a lot of people in more rural areas not getting necessarily great care because they’re not close to providers anymore. There’s these maternal deserts. We see, there’s a patient from Danville, Virginia that wrote about this in an op-ed, or south Boston, Virginia rather, who came to Duke because she had become ectopic, she had no one to care for her, and they had closed their hospital. So, there was no OBGYNs in the area anymore, and she almost died. And so, you’re seeing a rural, urban differences– it’s going to become more drastic unless things change, drastic differences in access to care, and that includes oncology care because the closer a person is to a GYN oncologist or oncology care in general, an oncologist, the better outcomes they’re going to have. And so that sort of happened. That’s been a regional/rural, urban divide. I can say I trained in California, where their emergency Medicaid covered abortions for patients. So, these are patients that didn’t otherwise, would have had health insurance and they wouldn’t have had health insurance during pregnancy. They would be able to get an abortion. They’re covered with that care, that emergency Medicaid, and our version of that does not because our state’s not going to have–there’s no federal funds for abortion care, period, but each state gets assigned their portion of their funding, and what happens with that is, so, our state, many states, red states particularly, are not going to have any funding, their state funding that goes to Medicaid or to any the public care or their Obamacare options that are more public from the state; none of them are going to pay for abortion. So, I felt like, regionally, there’s a war among the region where the South, you’re just going to have as an access.

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