---
title: "In Florida and Texas, maternity care is vanishing where it is needed most"
description: "Maternal-care deserts spread in two big Republican states, abortion is all but banned and fear keeps patients away"
author: "Albion Grey"
published: 2026-09-28T17:01:29Z
modified: 2026-09-29T02:24:52Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/in-florida-and-texas-maternity-care-is-vanishing-where-it-is-6871c9
language: en
tags: ["abortion", "health", "immigration", "politics", "reproductive-rights", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# In Florida and Texas, maternity care is vanishing where it is needed most

*Maternal-care deserts spread in two big Republican states, abortion is all but banned and fear keeps patients away*

By Albion Grey · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-florida-and-texas-maternity-care-is-vanishing-where-it-is-6871c9

## In brief

- Immokalee, in wealthy Collier County, has no hospital with a labour ward; some women give birth on the road
- Nearly 20% of Florida counties lack ready access to maternal specialists; 91% of rural hospitals have no obstetrics or gynaecology
- Immokalee’s only maternity clinic saw pregnant patients fall from about 2,200 in 2024 to 1,959 in 2025 amid immigration fears
- Florida spends nearly $30m a year on crisis pregnancy centres while Immokalee has no prenatal care or ultrasound services
- Texas has over 320,000 Latinas in maternal-care deserts; maternal mortality there rose 56% from 2019 to 2022

Immokalee, a farming town in southern Florida, styles itself America’s tomato capital. It sits in Collier, one of the state’s wealthiest counties, a couple of hours’ drive from Miami. Yet it has no hospital with a labour-and-delivery ward, and no specialists able to handle an obstetric emergency. Pregnant women travel up to an hour for care. In a largely Latino region where the poverty rate exceeds 28% and many families own no car, some do not make it. “They have their babies halfway and don’t make it to the hospital,” says Silvia Sabanilla, a resident of nearly 30 years. A friend of hers, she says, was one of them.

What is true of Immokalee is increasingly true of Florida as a whole. The Florida Association of Community Health Centers says specialists who look after mothers and babies are hard to find in almost 20% of the state’s counties. The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform puts the share of Florida’s rural hospitals without obstetrics and gynaecology services at 91%, the highest rate in the country. Such maternity-care deserts are [spreading elsewhere, too](https://rews.cc/a/fifty-maternity-wards-gone-in-ten-years-and-californians-dri-aeba2b): California has lost scores of hospital maternity wards in a decade.

Florida adds a second obstacle to distance: fear. Since 2023 the state’s medical centres have been permitted to ask patients about their immigration status. Patients are not required to answer, but many avoid the doctor altogether, even when they need one. Healthcare Network, the only federally qualified centre offering basic maternal care in Immokalee, treated about 2,200 pregnant patients in 2024; in 2025 the number fell to 1,959. “Historically, our trend had been to serve more and more people,” says Jamie Khemraj, its medical director. “That’s why we asked ourselves what is changing in the environment and how those changes are affecting our patients.”

Those who do dare to seek care can arrive in a state, some having walked long distances through heat that can reach 100°F (38°C). Dr Khemraj recalls a recent patient from Guatemala. “She walked three miles in plastic sandals because she had no other option. That day she was diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection.”

Behind the shortages lies politics. After America’s Supreme Court in 2022 struck down the ruling that had allowed abortion nationwide up to 24 weeks, reproductive justice moved to the centre of Florida’s political agenda. “Florida has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country,” says Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative. “Its effects reach every area of maternal care. Both women who are building a family and decide to have a child and those who want to end a pregnancy face a very difficult landscape.”

The state’s budget directs nearly $30m a year to a network of so-called crisis pregnancy centres, many linked to religious groups, where women are counselled against abortion. In Immokalee, meanwhile, there is no prenatal care at all. “Here it simply doesn’t exist. There is no care in that speciality. There are no specialists in this community,” says Dr Khemraj. That means no ultrasounds to assess fetal development or catch complications. Patients needing one are referred to Naples, a 40-minute drive away, where a single clinic staffed by a single specialist sees all the region’s women.

Texas offers a starker version of the same story. The National Women’s Law Center reports that more than 320,000 Latinas there live in maternal-care deserts, and more than 200,000 in counties without abortion access. Borders shape daily life for nearly 3m Latinas who could become pregnant, many of them immigrants who find it unthinkable to leave or travel; projections suggest that among immigrant women, four in ten lack legal documentation. In the Rio Grande Valley in the south, the March of Dimes reports that between 27% and 43% of women of childbearing age are uninsured.

Mónica (an assumed name) was 23 and studying criminology when she became pregnant for the first time in 2023, shortly after Roe v Wade fell. “I wasn’t doing well financially or emotionally; I still wanted to continue my studies. I wasn’t prepared,” she admits. After exploring alternatives in New Mexico and Colorado, she gave up. “I would have preferred to have an abortion and couldn’t because it’s illegal here in Texas.” Diagnosed with depression and uninsured, she endured a complicated pregnancy. “From the stress I had, I started bleeding… I worried they would put me in jail if the fetus died or something happened to it,” she recalls.

Her fears rest on a legal edifice two decades in the making. Texas’s Woman’s Right to Know Act of 2003 required a 24-hour waiting period and forced clinics to hand out material claiming links between abortion and cancer, a connection science has debunked. A mandatory ultrasound was added in 2011; insurance coverage for abortion was banned in 2017. In 2021 SB8 limited abortion to six weeks and empowered anyone to sue those who help a woman obtain one, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The “trigger law” of 2022 then banned abortion from conception, making it a crime in almost all cases.

Some consequences are now measurable. Before the near-total ban, Latinas accounted for the majority of abortions in Texas, according to the state’s Health and Human Services Commission. After the restrictions, a University of Houston study found that this group’s birth rate rose by more than 5%. One study of [requests to Mexican activist networks](https://rews.cc/a/post-roe-mexican-feminist-networks-have-become-an-american-a-defef2) shows the callers now come overwhelmingly from states with bans. Most grimly, an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that maternal mortality in Texas increased by 56% between 2019 and 2022.

America’s abortion argument is usually fought over abortion itself. The evidence from its two biggest conservative states suggests the collateral damage is far wider, touching women who dearly want their babies. Money follows politics one way—$30m a year for centres that talk women out of terminations—while obstetric wards, midwives and specialists quietly disappear. “I want them to understand that, even just once, they should put themselves in our shoes,” Mónica says. “Living in Texas isn’t for everyone.” Increasingly, and not only for those seeking an abortion, it is not for mothers either.