Why some maternity wards in hospitals are closing

Some hospitals are closing maternity wards, saying that fewer births and growing costs make them a money loser.

This Orlando Sentinel story explains one hospital’s decision to shut its unit after 18 years. It says:

“This is not just a local or regional phenomena,” Sam Steinberg, a hospital consultant based in Port Orange, Fla., told the paper. “We went through this huge long-term, decades-long trend in which hospitals were adding services, and labor and delivery units were one of those things. Every community hospital had a delivery unit.

“But over the past decade, we’re closing them down. Now hospitals are concentrating on services that make money,” Steinberg said, “because they have to.”

Birth rates in the United States dipped 3% to 4,055,000 in 2010. Those figures come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provisional counts released in June.