Rural Minnesotans are losing access to obstetric care, with recent closures in Fosston and New Prague. Birthing people in New Prague will now have to travel more than an hour away for service. The Fosston hospital is the nearest to the White Earth Indian Reservation, which is especially striking as Indigenous people are seven times more likely than white people to die around the time of childbirth in Minnesota.
This trend is not unique to Minnesota; it’s happening across the country, and the UMN Rural Health Research Center (RHRC) has been conducting research on rural maternity care for more than a decade. This trend of continued obstetric closures is significant, but now decision makers have a better sense of the potential consequences due to research conducted by the RHRC, whose research was extensively cited in recent public hearings about these two closures.