This is a guest opinion
Here’s a bureaucratic puzzle: What do you call a small, home-like birth setting staffed by midwives, designed specifically to offer low-intervention, low-cost maternity care to healthy mothers with low-risk pregnancies? If you’re the Alabama Department of Public Health, apparently the answer is: a hospital.
That’s the absurd regulatory position at the heart of Oasis Family Birthing Center v. Alabama Department of Public Health, a case recently before the Alabama Supreme Court. The court denied the center’s request to review its appeal earlier this month. The midwives and birth centers asking the court for relief had a simple, compelling argument: birth centers are not hospitals, have never been hospitals, and forcing them to obtain hospital licenses is effectively a death sentence for an entire model of care that Alabama women desperately need…