Jeanine Valrie Logan is working to open a birth center inside a former church on Chicago’s South Side, where there’s a dearth of options to have a baby.
Valrie Logan is a Black midwife. She envisions three rooms in the birth center where people can have their babies in an intimate space, as well as an upstairs clinic where patients — including those who aren’t pregnant — can have routine reproductive medical care.
But the church could be expensive to renovate — $3 million, Valrie Logan estimates, including equipment and furniture. As a nonprofit without big investors, she hopes to apply for money Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wants to designate toward improving Black maternal health, calling it “monumental.”
“It’s been hard to be honest,” Valrie Logan said. “We have a solution. We don’t have the funds for that solution.”
Pritzker wants to allocate more than $20 million in his proposed state budget to reduce health disparities and help prevent more Black women from dying before, during and after childbirth. He’s set to give his budget address on Wednesday, kicking off a round of negotiations for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
The money for birth equity initiatives would help cover what can be expensive barriers for community-based providers, such as licensing fees for midwives who deliver babies or capital expenses to open birth centers.
Having enough staff has been another barrier for birth centers to stay open. In birth centers, patients can deliver their babies with a midwife on a big bed in a homelike atmosphere rather than in a hospital.
Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton stressed the importance of Black women having trust in a health care system that hasn’t always provided it.
“It’s important that we have providers that connect to those communities, that look like those communities, that when women talk to them there’s a sense of understanding,” Stratton said.
She said she feels the need as a Black woman and as the mother of four daughters.
A state report last fall documented that while deaths among pregnant women are rare, they have increased across Illinois — and the majority of them were possibly preventable. More than half of the pregnancy-related deaths happened more than 60 days after the women gave birth.
Black women were nearly twice as likely to die from any pregnancy-related condition and almost three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related medical conditions, such as having a heart issue, compared to white women, the report found.
Stratton said meetings she had with Black midwives and doulas since last summer sparked the investments the state hopes to make. They talked about a host of obstacles, from getting fully paid for the services they provide to needing more resources to hire more people to support Black women through the birthing experience.
The state would spend about $12 million to create a child tax credit for low to middle-income families who have children younger than three years old. Pritzker wants to add more money to existing home visiting efforts that link new mothers to resources and invest in a pilot program that would provide diapers for new parents.
The state also would train providers to bill insurers more effectively. The idea is to bring in more money to help keep businesses, such as birth centers, open and sustainable.
Kristen Schorsch covers public health and Cook County for WBEZ.