CRAWFORDSVILLE — Heather Glines tried to push away thoughts of her first pregnancy, which was long, painful and required two epidurals. She’s an anxious person by nature. She’s quick to Google symptoms and isn’t afraid to pick up the phone and talk to a nurse.
But she couldn't ignore the bright red blood.
She and her husband, Eric, had been trying for a second child, a sibling for 5-year-old Aiden, for some time. Six months after a miscarriage, Heather was both elated and scared to find out she was pregnant again.
At seven weeks, a doctor told Heather the little bubble on the sonogram was a subchorionic hemorrhage. It didn’t quite mean bed rest, but it did mean not carrying anything more than 10 pounds and changing her schedule as a caretaker for disabled adults.
A high-risk pregnancy is a challenge on its own, but Heather and her family live in Ladoga — a quiet town without traffic lights or chain restaurants.
For prenatal care, Heather drives 25 minutes to Franciscan Health’s Crawfordsville location where doctors from Lafayette come down to assist in OB-GYN services. The hospital stopped delivering babies in March of 2011.
This small town in Montgomery County is part of a larger “maternity care desert.”
The March of Dimes’ “Nowhere to Go” report defines these areas as “a county in which access to maternity health care services is limited or absent, either through lack of services or barriers to a woman’s ability to access that care.”
The link between limited access to health care and Indiana’s high infant and maternal mortality rate – both above the national average – is becoming hard to ignore.
Closing the gap between rural patients and city doctors
Gov. Eric Holcomb addressed Indiana’s grim standings, seventh-highest infant mortality rate and the third-highest maternal mortality rate in the country, in his 2018 State of the State address. He spoke of initiatives to connect high-risk women who receive Medicaid with a community-based health worker.
Locally, Franciscan Health launched Project Swaddle to meet a similar goal.