BLANCO COUNTY, Texas — The United States faces an ongoing crisis, with millions of women struggling to find maternity care. In Central Texas, several counties have limited or no services at all.
Yadira Fernandez lives outside Blanco and is about to be a first-time mother. She decided to work with a midwife for the birth, rather than choosing a hospital because the nearest hospital for her delivery would be Austin or San Antonio.
"As you're growing in pregnancy, it gets a little bit harder to drive," Fernandez said. "It gets a little bit harder to move around, so making an hour drive one way isn't going to be fun."
It's a situation that licensed midwife Oona Mekas sees often in Mason, Blanco and Lee counties, which are considered "maternity care deserts" by the March of Dimes, a nonprofit focused on mothers and babies. A maternity care desert is a county where there is a lack of resources for women and no hospitals or birth centers nearby to offer them obstetric care.
"When you don't get the care you need when you need it, things get exacerbated. So if you're not getting a pap screening, which is just screening for cervical cancer, it could be possible that you don't catch it in time," Mekas said. "Then you have people who come in for care that are much sicker than they could have been."
Mekas also runs the Hill Country Women's Health Collective, which is a free women's clinic in Wimberley to help women who do not have insurance.
"We need more OBs [obstetricians] that are committed to serving these rural communities and rural counties, and there just aren't enough providers there. Not enough providers in Texas," Mekas said. "Half of the country is not living in cities. Half of our country is living in rural areas or areas that really have low access to care and we have to care about the whole country."
Mekas and Fernandez hope more attention could be paid to rural areas in this dire situation since it could also mean the difference between life and death.
"A lot of people will say, 'You choose a small town, you get what you get.' But I think that should never come with having to give up something like safety," Fernandez said.
Bastrop County is also considered a place with low access to maternity care. Take a look at March of Dimes' map of maternity care deserts.