Standing in front of an empty lot one afternoon in the Georgia heat, Katie Chubb gestures to the place where she’s been trying to open a birth center for six years.
“We’d have parking along the road,” she says, describing her vision for a place that would offer a more home-like alternative to a hospital birth.
Chubb is a community organizer in a state with some of the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality in the country. She says a birth center is badly needed here — Augusta, Ga., is surrounded by maternal health care deserts, where pregnancy care can be difficult to find and few alternatives exist outside of hospitals.
Her vision is for a freestanding clinic that employs mostly midwives and works in partnership with obstetricians.
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