Rally Review

#SaveTheNurseMidwiferyBirthCenter

As planned and promised, Friday’s rally was a large community event. More than 200 birth center supporters turned out. We were pregnant women, partners of pregnant women, young children, grandparents, and, generally speaking, community members of all ages and stages in life who understand the importance of and support women having choice in childbirth setting and care. We were a walking, chanting embodiment of the ideals expressed in PeaceHealth’s mission and values. So, too, was the petition we delivered with nearly 10,000 signatures. If you missed the rally, check out the media coverage and look at our Twitter feed @LaneCoFBC for the blow-by-blow tweets.

Community Shows Up, PeaceHealth Still Deliberately MIA 

There is something really wrong when healthcare providers – looking at you PeaceHealth and Women’s Care – put pregnant women and their families in a profound bind: give up and go away or stand up for what is right. Isn’t standing up for what is right what PeaceHealth and Women’s Care should be doing? What’s worse is these entities behave in ways that suggest their strategy is to out wait us, to wear us down. How cynical. Waiting us out is their strategy for pushing through plans that hurt our community. Doing this on the backs of pregnant women is, in a word, shameful.

As a health care provider, PeaceHealth should be supporting the birth choices of pregnant women. Instead, it creates and persists in a situation in which women are left with no alternative but to go into the street to rally for access to evidence-based, affordable birth care. See “Why We Rally” for more on this as well as our rally talking points. And, then check out the flair and panache with which rallying is done. Click here and scroll down till you see the many fabulous signs.

Federal, State, County, and City Elected officials say: #SaveTheNurseMidwiferyBirthCenter

While we persist, PeaceHealth digs in to wait us out and shut us out. We are incredibly grateful for our elected representatives who have voiced their whole-hearted support for our objective: maintaining and expanding access to midwifery-led care at the Nurse Midwifery Birth Center.

We have support from city, county, state, and federal elected representatives. Why is our representatives’ expression of support met by a wall of silence from PeaceHealth, which is awash in government dollars? How can this lack of accountability and transparency be deemed acceptable behavior?

Left: Eugene City Councilor Emily Semple
Right: Rep. Marty Wilde in red jacket

Special thanks go to Councilor Semple, Representative Wilde, Commissioner Sorenson (letter), Commissioner Berney who emailed to let us know he supports us, and Congressman DeFazio whose response was read out lead at the rally.

See @LaneCoFBC for videos of Councilor Semple and Representative Wilde speaking at the rally point outside of PeaceHealth.

Local Media Coverage

Who else are we grateful to? Our local media. At a time when we are fully ignored by PeaceHealth, we appreciate being able to speak about our concerns publicly. We believe continued attention is warranted. We are concerned PeaceHealth expects the media to move on. Let's hope this does not occur.

The week going into the rally, we appreciated having space in The Eugene Weekly for “Peace Health Shouldn’t Own Birth” and for its retweet of the guest editorial the day of the rally. At the rally, we were pleased to speak with reporters from KLCC, KEZI, KMTR, and KEPW. Coverage here.

Security Barred Our Entrance

Our final thoughts for this post  bring us back to the source of our problem: PeaceHealth leadership. Our purpose for the rally was to present our petition of nearly 10,000 signatures to PeaceHealth leaders. When no one from PeaceHealth met with us at the rally point outside the RiverBend entrance, a small group was sent to go inside for the purpose of providing the petition. This group was barred from entering RiverBend.

Among us were a pregnant mom with a stroller and small children, and another mom with a baby in a carrier. We were met by security outside PeaceHealth’s entrance. After unsuccessful efforts to negotiate our entrance with him, a security manager intervened and permitted our access to the lobby. We were escorted in by security and told we could not take photos. Our request for PeaceHealth leadership to be contacted by security was refused. With no alternative, we presented the community petition to PeaceHealth security. We were reluctantly provided with written confirmation that the petition had been received. Obtaining this receipt required another discussion in which only our unwillingness to leave resulted in being given one. 

Our preference was and remains to be in a proper meeting with PeaceHEalth CEO Mary Kingston to begin the process of reversing the decision to close the Nurse Midwifery Birth Center. Instead, we were told to leave the premises, but not before learning that PeaceHealth leadership had made plans for their PR Manager, and not their CEO, to receive the petition. This is not the approach or presentation described, less than a year ago, in The Register-Guard article introducing CEO Kingston to the community she serves. 

Onward

What we need, as soon as possible, is a PeaceHealth RiverBend CEO capable of understanding and rising to the challenge before her, not ignoring it and the people who raise it. With the ongoing support of community members and leaders and our elected representatives, we will continue forward toward honest and transparent discussion. Toward these goals, we leave supporters and interested parties with the following graph created by a Nurse Midwifery Birth Center father. 

Graph using OHA data by Andrew Coury, 2nd generation NMBC parent.
Andrew was born at the NMBC and hopes to welcome the third generation there.

PeaceHealth leaders' public reason for closing the Nurse Midwifery Birth Center is financial, which they attribute to demographic trends; specifically a lower general birth rate and a higher average maternal age. Even if true... a 4 year old demographic trend? Furthermore, it's not true. Average maternal age is 26 in Lane County (source).

What's the real story in the precipitous drop in birth center births between 2014 and 2018? The real reason far outpaced any demographic change in the overall birth rate. Lane County Friends of the Birth Center believes the real reason rests in risk polices imposed on the NMBC, which served to unnecessarily push women into the hospital. See October 2011 on the graph when Sacred Heart in-house OB/GYN care ended and was replaced with a contract for Women’s Care to provide obstetric consultation. Also important to keep in mind is the neglectful PeaceHealth management policies which de-prioritize the Nurse Midwifery Birth Center and make it vulnerable to the kind of moment in which we find ourselves currently.

#SaveTheNurseMidwiferyBirthCenter

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