Kansas City area birth center closes, limiting options for women of color, moms in need
Desiree Moorman gave birth to her first child at a hospital. The labor was filled with medical interventions and fear.
For her second birth, Moorman choose New Birth Company, a low-intervention, natural birthing center with locations in Kansas City, Kansas, and Overland Park.
New Birth Company has worked to provide women with an affordable childbirth option outside of hospitals. In recent years, the center has seen an increasingly diverse group of women walk through their doors. Now that’s ending.
“Both of my births … ended with wonderful children, but one was very traumatic and one was very freeing and empowering,” Moorman said Monday, standing in front of the brick building that houses the birth center’s Kansas City, Kansas, campus at 721 N. 31st St.
The clinic opened five years ago with the goal of serving mothers in the urban core on both sides of the state line in the hopes of reducing maternal and infant morbidity and mortality rates.
It was the only licensed and accredited midwife-led birth center in Wyandotte County — until Friday, when leadership announced it closed its doors.
Kendra Wyatt, New Birth Company’s CEO, co-founder and a mother who too gave birth at the center, said the closure isn’t about claims, services or relationships with physicians or hospitals. For them, it’s the result of a failure of the malpractice market.
In late spring, New Birth Company’s medical malpractice insurance carrier notified the center that they were no longer underwriting birth centers or midwives. They were the last carrier in Kansas covering midwives and birth centers not employed by physicians or hospitals. New Birth Company’s insurance contracts required them to carry facility malpractice insurance. Without it, they could only serve women who pay out of pocket for their births.
“The market simply failed to provide competitive insurance options, especially during the unprecedented challenges over the last year,” Wyatt said in a news release Friday. “Numerous factors contributed to this closure, but chronically low Medicaid reimbursement rates for certified nurse midwives and birth centers has exasperated it.”
The company organized a rally Monday, calling on changes to policy.
Hannah Cannon held her 7-month-old daughter, Tiffany, beneath the shade of a tree as women took turns sharing their birth stories. Her daughter donned a onesie with the words, “Safely and affordably born” hand-written across it.
Though she had a good hospital experience during the birth of her first daughter, Cannon said with the combination of hospital restrictions during the pandemic and the expense of the hospital birth of her first child — it cost her $6,000 with insurance — she decided to try New Birth Company.
“My choice, my body doesn’t just apply for birth control,” Cannon said. “It’s also for giving birth. We should have the choice of what makes us most comfortable.”
She said the switch was also a moral one. Cannon said she knew that New Birth Company worked to support mothers of color.
Black women have the highest pregnancy related mortality rate among all races — 40.8 deaths per 100,000 births, a rate more than three times higher than white women, according to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Quality of healthcare, structural racism and implicit bias play a role in the disparity, according to the CDC.
The Kansas City, Kansas, facility was serving about 100 moms in various stages of their pregnancies as of July 1, Wyatt said. About 40% of those mothers were Medicaid recipients. Sometimes women traveled from as far as Arkansas and Oklahoma for births.
Last year, 22% of the women served at the Kansas City, Kansas, center were Black; 9% self-identified as Hispanic, Wyatt said. The diversity of their clientele has grown in recent years, she said, shattering the myth that birth centers are only for wealthy white women.
“Birth should not be segregated by our income or our race,” Cannon said, noting the diversity of the patients she saw waiting beside her during check-ups. “Every woman should have the experience that she wants and the opportunity to feel safe.”
According to a 2017 Wyandotte County Community Health Assessment, Black infant mortality stood at a rate of 12.9 deaths per 1,000 births compared to 6.2 deaths for every 1,000 birth statewide.
New Birth Company also served women from Kansas City where for nearly every three white babies who don’t survive past infancy, nine Black infants die, according to the Kansas City Health Department. There is only one licensed birthing center on the other side of the state line, and it is in the St. Louis suburbs.
“In the era of our Black mother morbidity and mortality crisis, New Birth Company has provided a vital service with exceptional outcomes, with an emphasis on Wyandotte’s underserved neighborhoods,” said Kayla Lawrence, clinical director for New Birth Company.
Since opening its doors in Wyandotte County in 2016, New Birth Company has served about 860 women for maternity services, Lawrence said. In that time, their overall Cesarean-section rate was 5.2%, she said. In 2019, 31.7% of the births across the county were by c-section, according to the CDC.
“Closing this clinic is tragic,” said Howard Russell, chairman of the board of Mercy and Truth Medical Missions, where New Birth Company was housed. “For six years we’ve been working together to change the birth outcomes in Wyandotte County.”
Russell, who had three grandchildren born at the center, said the closure is a failure of both the legislative and bureaucratic processes.
“Federal and state have basically talked a good talk, but talk without action is still failure,” he said.
While the Overland Park facility (which is able to remain open because of a clinical partnership) has the room to take on some of those mothers as patients, many of the women are immigrants without driver’s licenses and lower-income women without cars, Wyatt said.
Wyatt said they hope to continue to work with policymakers, the (Kansas Department of Health and Environment), the Healthcare Stabilization Fund and the Department of Insurance “to ensure that healthcare providers have access to an adequate insurance market. We want small women led businesses to continue to serve KanCare moms.”
“For a health plan executive ... to say that mom needs to navigate her way down to Overland Park, we don’t agree with that,” Wyatt said. “And it will result in less prenatal care and delayed prenatal care, and an increase in emergency admissions to the hospital.”
