Future could depend on lowering cost of childbirth | THE MOM STOP

When I was pregnant with my first child, we seemingly planned for everything.

My mom helped us find a great deal on second-hand, barely-used nursery furniture, I sewed dupioni silk curtains and she helped me make custom crib bedding to match. My husband installed board and batten trim work on the nursery walls and we painted the upper part of the nursery a perfect, gender-neutral, robin’s egg blue.

And with the help of multiple baby showers, we stocked our daughter’s closet with months worth of baby clothes and diapers. We had baby socks and bottles, a stroller and a car seat. When the big day finally came, we were seemingly prepared for everything.

That is, except for the actual cost of giving birth.

We were lucky, because of health insurance through my job, we had paid a couple hundred dollars a month during the first 20 weeks of the pregnancy to cover our part of the prenatal care that I received, plus the cost of the obstetrician during delivery that wasn’t covered by insurance.

But when our newborn daughter was a few months old, we started receiving bills we weren’t prepared for: a separate bill for the anesthesiologist for the epidural I decided to get at the last minute. There were costs of staying in the hospital for two days, the cost of care our new baby received, and fees from other medical professionals who assisted us during that time. Because our daughter was jaundiced and we had to come back for repeat weigh-ins and bilirubin blood tests in the week or two following birth, plus met with a lactation consultant, the costs added up.

I knew childbirth was expensive, but we weren’t quite prepared. Even still, we were lucky — we ended up paying about $1,500 post birth — which I knew was a bargain compared to the average $9,000-$12,000 for a vaginal birth back in 2009.

But as costs have gone up for everything in recent years, the cost of childbirth has skyrocketed. According to the Health Care Cost Institute, on average, vaginal childbirth in the U.S. costs about $14,000. If you require a cesarean section for birth, or face other complications, the costs increase even higher. The average cost of a cesarean section today in the U.S. is around $25,000.

Costs do vary state-by-state, with states in the South generally cheaper than places like California or Oregon — but Southern states also carry a higher maternal mortality rates. If a mother experiences something like a miscarriage that requires medical intervention or even a stillbirth — medical costs can be just as high as if the child had been born healthy. From personal experience, nothing makes the awful pain of losing a pregnancy worse than having to pay high medical bills for a baby you never got to bring home.

Globally, the U.S. has the second-highest cost of childbirth, second only to Japan, where new parents pay an average of $61,800 to give birth.

So what should American mothers do? Insurance helps, but many parents have a hard time even paying copays or the post-birth bills when they range in four or five digits. You can save for childbirth, which many people do, or work out a payment plan with the hospital, which my husband and I did after our first child. Some young adults wait to have children or decide not to procreate at all.

But with costs of everything going ever higher with inflation and families already cutting costs where they can — we need to do more for new mothers. When the U.S. has the second-highest cost of childbirth in the world and one of the only countries in the world without any paid maternity leave, it’s a sign that we can — and should — do better.

Our future generation depends on it.

Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at momstopcolumn@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Future could depend on lowering cost of childbirth | THE MOM STOP