Phillips County moms face longer drives as delivery care shrinks

Phillips County mothers once reached delivery care in a median of six minutes, and Helena Regional Medical Center delivered 69% of county births in 2019. The hospital closed its labor and delivery unit in 2020. The former Helena hospital was sold in 2024 for $2.5 million, renamed Progressive Health of Helena, and the birthing gap that opened four years earlier never closed.

Helena Regional had reported at least a $1.3 million loss every year since 2004. The loss of maternity care there sits alongside other closures across Arkansas, including Magnolia Regional Medical Center’s birthing unit, and when Crossett’s unit reopens, fewer than half of the state’s hospitals, just 37, are expected to offer birthing services.

The trip to Little Rock is roughly two hours and about 114 miles, turning prenatal visits and labor into a gas bill, a child-care problem and, in an emergency, a race against time. UAMS Health’s Women’s Center in Little Rock puts OB-GYN ultrasound and high-risk pregnancy care under one roof, and its maternal-fetal medicine specialists are the only ones in central Arkansas.

The Arkansas Department of Health’s 2023 fact sheet listed 35 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births, 92% preventable, and Black non-Hispanic women 1.8 times as likely to die as white non-Hispanic women. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders created a maternal-health committee in March 2024, and it issued a progress report in September 2024, but Arkansas still has not moved to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months.