As a baby bust hits rural areas, hospital labor and delivery wards are closing down

Rural regions like the one surrounding this southern Iowa town used to have a lot more babies and many more places to give birth to them.

At least 41 Iowa hospitals have shuttered their labor and delivery units since 2000. Those facilities, representing about a third of Iowa hospitals, are located mostly in rural areas where birth numbers have plummeted. In some Iowa counties, annual numbers of births have fallen by three-quarters since the height of the baby boom in the 1950s and '60s, when many rural hospitals were built or expanded, state and federal records show.

Read the Full Article.