Detranay Blankenship was 16 weeks pregnant when she found out she was expecting. The days passed quickly, and soon she was 7 centimeters dilated at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital.
The 26-year-old first-time mom wasn’t sure what to expect during labor, but the team at MLK’s maternity ward soon felt like family. Every hour midwife Angela Sojobi bustled in to check on her progress and offer cheerful words of encouragement. When it was time to push, a nurse lowered the lights and flipped on the soothing sound of rain.
After 14 hours of labor, baby Myla made her appearance in the world. “That’s my grandbaby!” Latrina Jackson, Blankenship’s mother, shouted. The family’s cheers rang down the hall.
Blankenship lives just blocks away from MLK, where her labor was cozy and personalized. It was the kind of birth that many parents-to-be hope for, but a decade of widespread cutbacks to maternity care in California has made it almost a luxury. It’s available only because MLK’s leaders are fighting to keep maternity services despite steep financial losses.
Over the last decade, nearly 50 maternity wards have closed across California, with more than half shutting down in just the last four years. Seventeen of them were in Los Angeles County, where maternity ward closures have far outpaced the region’s declining birth rate. Driving the trend in L.
A. are for-profit hospitals owned by multi-state corporations. For-profit companies owned 13 of the 17 hospitals that.
