Moms go the extra mile for maternity care amidst shortage in Central Pennsylvania

SAINT MARYS, Pa. (WTAJ) —While abortion and women’s reproductive rights remain a hot topic, one question remains unaddressed: What about access to healthcare for pregnant women who want to be mothers?

Nationwide, 217 hospital obstetric units closed over the past decade in an alarming trend that has continued into 2024 with hospitals citing a declining birthrate , increased costs, staffing shortages and the effect of antiabortion laws as reasons to cause pregnant women to literally go the extra miles to access labor and delivery resources in the very moments leading up to their baby’s birth.

WTAJ sat down with two of these women. While their stories are unique to them, they speak to a larger story shared amongst many of the over 65 million women of childbearing age in the United States.

Mary Eckert and her husband, Justin, of Saint Marys, welcomed their son Myles into the world Feb. 21 of this year at Penn Highlands DuBois via labor induction.

Due to issues during labor, Eckert began bleeding during her son’s delivery. It took doctors two hours to stop the bleeding and then she was placed on a catheter for 12 hours.

However, the decline in care Eckert received occurred overnight, she said, after the catheter had been removed and she was left to lay in bed for hours, unaware of the dangers of doing so.

“I was so tired, I was weak. Nobody helped me get out of bed. Nobody told me I needed to get out of bed. So I just went to sleep,” Eckert said.

A nurse saw Eckert the next morning, 12 hours after the catheter was removed and 12 hours after Eckert was last able to void. The result — Eckert’s bladder became stretched to a point that it could no longer function properly. Over two liters of fluid had to be removed via a catheter that Eckert would require for the next six weeks.

Eckert was told by a nurse that this oversight was because the staff “got busy” with other patients, something Eckert feels will become a trend with the closure of Penn Highland’s labor and delivery unit in neighboring Elk County.

“When I expressed the concerns, they’re like, well, the important thing is you have a healthy baby, which, yes, absolutely, he is my first priority,” Eckert said. “But he also deserves to have a healthy mom coming home. And he didn’t have that for six weeks,” she said.

While Eckert said she chose to deliver at Penn Highlands DuBois, which has the only neonatal intensive care unit within 100 miles, she now wishes she would have done things differently.

That was a personal preference. Also, like with the NICU, it was just to know that if we needed the NICU, we wouldn’t be separated since there’s not one in Saint Marys. Yeah, it was a choice that I made and I wish I would have gone to Elk

Mary Eckert

Following this experience, Eckert has spent countless hours driving countless miles, with her newborn baby in the backseat, to receive care for her injuries that could have been avoided with proper postnatal care. Eleven weeks later, she is still recovering.

As of May 1, Penn Highlands Elk has discontinued all labor and delivery services , leaving women with no choice but to travel to DuBois or utilize the Emergency Department at Elk, where Autumn Bonfardin went in October 2022 when she knew something was wrong with her pregnancy.

“When the doctor came in, he walked in the room, never introduced himself to me, hopped up on the counter, just like he was about to tell me the afternoon weather and he said to me, ‘so you’re having a miscarriage. Any questions?'” Bonfardin said. “We just sat there and kind of looked at each other. He hops off the counter and was like, ‘so any questions?’ I was like, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do?’ And he goes, ‘nothing.'”

Because of this bad experience that left Bonfardin with more questions than answers, and her next pregnancy being high risk, Bonfardin, and her husband Seth, made the decision to use the maternal care services at Penn Highlands DuBois during her pregnancy with their son, Vincent.

However, Bonfardin did not find the treatment there better than at Penn Highlands Elk.

“I actually went in for a doctor’s appointment and I was telling them for a few weeks that I wasn’t feeling well. They ended up not listening to me,” Bonfardin said. “After a couple weeks of not feeling well, I finally was hooked up to some monitors, found out I was in labor for a few days already and I didn’t know, and had an emergency C-section.”

During this time, Seth, an auto mechanic, was nearly 50-minutes away at work in Elk County. He had to rush down Interstate 255 to be there for his son’s birth. “Thankfully, he made it in time,” Bonfardin said.

Besides both being first-time moms, Eckert and Bonfardin have much more in-common — they do not want other women to experience what they did due to a lack of access to maternal care resources.

Dr. Shreya Patel with Mount Nittany Medical Center’s OB/GYN Department has been in practice for 24 years and said she believes she has averaged over 100 deliveries per year since joining Mount Nittany in 2008. Dr. Patel agrees that distance to a hospital could be a risk factor for women in certain emergency situations.

“I would think that the biggest risk that I can think of that a patient could experience, and they might live close to the hospital and still need emergency services, is hemorrhage, excessive bleeding,” Dr. Patel said. “So I think in the case of any emergency, no matter where a patient lives, they should call 911 to get emergency care and then emergency transport to the nearest facility.”

However, Dr. Patel does state that hemorrhaging is not common and March of Dimes reports that only 1% to 5% of all women who have a baby suffer from postpartum hemorrhage.

While Penn Highlands Elk is only the most recent example of labor and delivery unit closures in Central Pennsylvania, pregnant women in the northern tier are far from being the only ones impacted.

Bedford, Cameron, Elk, Huntingdon and Somerset counties do not have any hospitals that provide labor services, forcing pregnant women in these areas to travel to neighboring counties.

Although women in Jefferson County can deliver at Punxsutawney Area Hospital, that unit only has one private delivery room. UPMC Altoona reports having 18 labor rooms and Mount Nittany Health Center has six rooms.

March of Dimes estimates that as of 2022, at least 6.9 million women, giving birth to over 500,000 babies has low or no access to maternal health care — a number that has likely only grown following more recent closures, with states with large rural populations suffering the most .

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“I would definitely say that there’s a huge national shortage of physicians, and there’s going to be a continued shortage of physicians,” said Dr. Patel.

If you are a mom who had to “go the extra mile” to access maternal care and want to share your story, please contact me by emailing obosar@wtajtv.com .

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