- Oct 17, 2011
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If you’re pregnant in Bonner County, Idaho, you’ll likely spend a lot of time on Route 95.
Bonner General Health, a 25-bed hospital, discontinued obstetrics, labor and delivery services this year. So for residents, Route 95 is the way to the closest in-state hospital with obstetrics care, which is at least an hour’s drive south — or longer in the snowy winter.
The hospital, which staffed the county’s only OB-GYNs, cited the state’s “legal and political climate” as one of the reasons it shuttered the department. Abortion has been banned in Idaho, with few exceptions, since August 2022.
The four OB-GYNs who previously worked at Bonner General, meanwhile, have left Idaho to practice in states where abortion is legal. All four told NBC News that the state’s ban contributed to their decisions to move.
Drs. Amelia Huntsberger, Kristin Algoe and Lindsay Conner — former Bonner OB-GYNs who now work in Oregon, New York and Colorado, respectively — each said some of their Sandpoint patients had to start strategizing about whose car they could borrow or how they would pay for gas to travel for maternity care after the department closed.
Huntsberger, who was on the Idaho Health and Welfare Department’s now-disbanded Maternal Mortality Review Committee, emphasized that poverty and maternal mortality are intertwined. In Idaho, she said, Medicaid recipients accounted for the majority of pregnancy-related deaths in recent years. Despite the committee’s recommendations to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage to last 12 months, Idaho was one of just three states where legislators finished this year’s session without doing so.
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Bradish said her biggest fear is about the timing of her due date in January — what she calls “blizzard time,” given that Sandpoint can get more than 30 inches of snow that month.
She has already stocked up on “shower curtains and some rubber gloves for the car,” Bradish said, in case she winds up delivering on the drive to Spokane [90 minutes away].
“That may sound like a joke, but it’s not,” she said.
See also: from earlier this year
Bonner General Health, a 25-bed hospital, discontinued obstetrics, labor and delivery services this year. So for residents, Route 95 is the way to the closest in-state hospital with obstetrics care, which is at least an hour’s drive south — or longer in the snowy winter.
The hospital, which staffed the county’s only OB-GYNs, cited the state’s “legal and political climate” as one of the reasons it shuttered the department. Abortion has been banned in Idaho, with few exceptions, since August 2022.
The four OB-GYNs who previously worked at Bonner General, meanwhile, have left Idaho to practice in states where abortion is legal. All four told NBC News that the state’s ban contributed to their decisions to move.
Drs. Amelia Huntsberger, Kristin Algoe and Lindsay Conner — former Bonner OB-GYNs who now work in Oregon, New York and Colorado, respectively — each said some of their Sandpoint patients had to start strategizing about whose car they could borrow or how they would pay for gas to travel for maternity care after the department closed.
Huntsberger, who was on the Idaho Health and Welfare Department’s now-disbanded Maternal Mortality Review Committee, emphasized that poverty and maternal mortality are intertwined. In Idaho, she said, Medicaid recipients accounted for the majority of pregnancy-related deaths in recent years. Despite the committee’s recommendations to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage to last 12 months, Idaho was one of just three states where legislators finished this year’s session without doing so.
--
Bradish said her biggest fear is about the timing of her due date in January — what she calls “blizzard time,” given that Sandpoint can get more than 30 inches of snow that month.
She has already stocked up on “shower curtains and some rubber gloves for the car,” Bradish said, in case she winds up delivering on the drive to Spokane [90 minutes away].
“That may sound like a joke, but it’s not,” she said.
See also: from earlier this year
