Alabama cracks down on birth centers, leaving pregnant women with fewer options

Dr. Heather Skanes’ team at the Oasis Family Birthing Center in Birmingham, Alabama, started turning away patients this spring as state officials cracked down on alternative childbirth options.

The center had offered patients with low-risk pregnancies a place to deliver their babies outside of a hospital, where cesarean sections weren’t performed, epidurals weren’t administered and midwives took the lead. Some women labored in an inflatable aqua birthing pool, in what Skanes saw as a more supportive environment in which Black women in particular would feel more comfortable and heard.

But in March, officials with the Alabama Department of Public Health told Skanes that they considered the previously unregulated facility to be a hospital that didn’t have proper permission to be open, according to her attorneys.

Only patients who were in their third trimesters when the clampdown occurred could still have their babies at Oasis.

Everyone else would have to go elsewhere.