Evo predicted this. Sounds like they're having a midwife crisis.

But seriously this is just a small rural hospital and they close all the time. It's some town with 22,000 people. The hospital was going to close the maternity ward anyway. This just sped it up. There's an award winning maternity ward several miles away that is far superior.

The usual way where I live is that unless you have an issue you never even see a doctor, and will deliver at a midwife led unit, or home of you want. Birth and pregnancy is seen as a natural thing not an illness. Over medicalized birth as the US does it is not good. You cannot trust the monolithic corrupt hospital bureaucracies to do anything but harm you just as avidly as all the other tentacles of the state crime empire.

When my wife was pregnant we had no medical insurance. We paid a midwife $850 for all of her prenatal checkups, delivery, and post-partum care. We paid out of pocket for an ultrasound. She did exercises prescribed by the midwife to turn the baby out of the breach position. Delivered the baby in a her own bed. I can't imagine why every woman who isn't at high risk doesn't deliver like this. Birthing at home with no meds, using traditional birthing position. No eating nasty processed hospital food, no bullsh!t paperwork. Cutting umbilical cord after 15 minutes, no vaccines at birth. Not separating mother and child, not removing foreskin. No exposing the infant to hospital-borne pathogens, no weird machines beeping at you, no strangers present at the birth. There is nothing more impressive than a woman giving a natural birth to a child born outside of the Matrix.

We actively keep genetic failures from dying, allowing their defects to spread through the population. Every C-section, every preme baby, every induction, they're all failures that pollute our blood. These things have and will continue to become more and more common until a home birth is not physically possible for 95% of the population. We are losing our independence, and have made ourselves slaves to our own technology and the state.

I don't care if maternity wards close, only hypochondriac histrionic women go there or women with some physical heath problems, neither of which deserve to breed and pollute the genepool with their defects.