Nurses, community advocate for mother-baby units
Nurses, physicians and community members came together Saturday afternoon in defense of Watsonville Community hospital’s mother-baby service lines, which include labor and delivery and neonatal intensive care, at a town hall organized by nurses.
Pajaro Valley Health Care District is considering closing the labor and delivery and NICU service lines at WCH due to ongoing financial issues exacerbated by H.R.1, a federal law that changes federal spending for healthcare and welfare.
The Pajaro Valley Health Care District has not confirmed a date to release its final recommendation on closing service lines, but a discussion is on the agenda for the board meeting on Oct. 28.
Around 90 people were in attendance for the Care Not Cuts town hall on Oct. 24 led by intensive care nurse Roseann Farris, who has worked at the hospital for 30 years. Farris called on community members to attend the Oct. 28 PVHCD board meeting and contact board members expressing their support for the mother-baby service lines.
She presented the hospital’s history of cuts and financial issues and addressed the H.R. 1 cuts, which she said will cut vital healthcare to some of the most vulnerable patients and communities. At Watsonville Community Hospital, the cuts are expected to cost the hospital $4 to $6 million over the next year and close to $100 million over the next 10 years, according to a presentation by CFO Julie Peterson at the Sept. 22 PVHCD board meeting.
“Regardless of these looming challenges, we are not going to somehow cut our way to a better place by closing the women’s and children’s services department,” Farris said.
A panel consisting of a range of WCH mother-baby service providers presented their concerns and perspectives on the situation.
Thanh Pitchforth, a labor and delivery nurse, and Heather Brown, a NICU nurse, spoke about the importance of experience and regular practice in their units.
Obstetric emergencies, such as when the shoulder of a baby is stuck in the birth canal, require specialized experience to treat safely and effectively. For the mother, this likely leads to an emergency cesarean section and can develop into a postpartum hemorrhage, a dangerous bleeding after childhood, both of which take a team to treat. For the baby, it requires a neonatal nursing specialty and practiced skill to restore oxygen levels, according to Brown.
Minutes matter for maternal outcomes, affecting things such as postpartum depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome and short-term and long-term disabilities, Pitchforth said.
“You can’t be a skilled registered nurse in any nursing specialty if you are not practicing those clinical skills on your shift on a daily basis,” Pitchforth said. “What I and what any experienced labor nurse would also worry about is … what could happen to a mother and child in an emergency situation.”
Brown said she is concerned about the chance for “catastrophic outcomes” should a neonatal or obstetric emergency happen in the emergency department.
Transportation, both for the mother in labor and for transferring premature babies, was a concern among panelists and community members. Commute times to the neighboring maternity wards in Salinas and Santa Cruz can take up to an hour and many low-income families share vehicles or do not have access to a car, according to Pajaro Middle School community school specialist Laila Vazquez.
Madhu Raghavan, who worked as a physician in Watsonville for 39 years, called on major companies in neighboring Silicon Valley to step up financially.
“Can some of those tech companies help the small farmer communities where they benefit from all our products?” Raghavan asked. “All that is very small change for them.”
Raghavan and Farris also called for attendees to vote yes on Measure E, the temporary half-cent sales tax created to protect the health and welfare community services threatened by federal cuts.
Mother and baby units generally do not make money for hospitals, a pattern that is true at WCH, where the combined units lose an average of $27,000 a day, according to PVHCD Chair Tony Nuñez. Andrew Harkins, a pediatric hospitalist at WCH, said the hospital is becoming a victim of the imbalance system caused by the underlying incentives of our medical system, which prioritize profit-generating care.
“It’s not about loss,” said Jessica Avila-Miller, a nurse in the telemetry unit. “It’s a moral obligation for us to support women and children.”
During the general forum period, some community members expressed concern over the board making a recommendation before the Nov. 3 election results for the county’s Measure E and the state’s Proposition 40 are released. Prop. 40, commonly referred to as the “Billionaire Tax,” is expected to generate tens of billions in revenue for healthcare over 5 years, according to the California Budget & Policy Center.
Melanie Kendall, a labor and delivery nurse, said the hospital’s partnership with Salud Para La Gente to provide culturally-responsive care, such as doulas, to Spanish- and Mixtec-speaking patients is something other hospitals in the county don’t have.
“It is so hard to be in one of your most vulnerable states delivering a child,” Kendall said. “It is crucial that Watsonville Hospital stays open, that these patients have somebody to advocate for them.”
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Missouri’s GOP Has a New Strategy to Ban Abortion—Attack Trans Kids
Dr. Jennifer Smith remembers canvassing to overturn Missouri’s abortion ban back in 2024. Now she’s spending her weekends knocking doors in her white coat to make sure her home state doesn’t ban abortion again.
Smith, an OB-GYN, had seen what happened to her patients after Roe v. Wade was overturned and a “trigger” law immediately went into effect banning virtually all abortions in the state.
“You could see how scared people were to just consider being pregnant in the state of Missouri,” she said. “I had husbands feel the need to tell me that I should save their wives if something should happen in the pregnancy. And that’s a pretty terrifying place to be.”
Even before the fall of Roe, abortion access in Missouri was extremely limited. The state is home to some of the most vociferous abortion opponents in the country. Among them are Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who has made himself a leading figure in the national push to ban abortion pills; his wife Erin, a top attorney at the Alliance Defending Freedom; and Ed Martin, a stop-the-stealer who helped craft the GOP’s fetal personhood platform in 2024.
Missouri is also one of the most dangerous states for pregnant women, with maternal mortality rates much higher than most of the country. And once the trigger ban was enacted, the medical-legal landscape became even darker for both patients and doctors: OB-GYN residency applications in the state declined by 25 percent. “As a physician, it feels like we have to be afraid that if we take care of patients in the way that we normally would, that we might go to prison for that,” Smith said.
Christian Hendrix, MD, picks up signs and flyers at a No on 3 rally and canvassing event in St. Louis, Missouri. Theo R. Welling
People who needed abortions were forced to spend time and money on travel, and made to experience some of the worst moments of their lives isolated in an unfamiliar place. Some drove for hours on end while in danger of sepsis or hemorrhage just to reach a hospital that would treat them. “I had a patient who was pregnant twice in one year, and both times her baby had a chromosomal abnormality,” Smith remembered. “Twice she and her husband had to make the most difficult decision a parent can make: to end the pregnancy. And twice they had to leave the state to get the care they needed, away from their home, their doctor, everything familiar.” In 2024, Smith canvassed for a referendum to repeal the state’s near-total ban.
Missouri voters passed that referendum—called Amendment 3—with 51.6 percent of the vote. The first state to enact a “trigger ban” became the first state to reject that ban at the ballot box. But that wasn’t the end of the story: even after the ban was overturned, Missouri implemented dozens of restrictions on how abortion clinics could operate—ensuring that in much of the state, abortion was legal in theory but not in practice. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers worked to craft another attempt at a full-scale ban.
Now, Smith is back to knocking doors in her white coat. This time, she’s asking people to vote no on 2026’s Amendment 3—which, despite sharing a number with the 2024 amendment, does the opposite. And unlike the first Amendment 3, this one was initiated by the legislature, not by citizens.
“We already won the battle for abortion here in Missouri, and that is why they added gender-affirming care.”
“We have voters that we believe are confused,” said Stop The Ban campaign manager Alessia Modjarrad. “They consider themselves for abortion, for reproductive freedom—but the language is confusing, and they’re hypothetically voting yes, but really they should be voting no.”
In 2025, Republican lawmakers introduced the current Amendment 3 proposal to reestablish a constitutional abortion ban and overturn the 2024 referendum. To increase their chances of success, they adopted a strategy right out of the Trump 2.0 “Kamala is for they/them” playbook: including language in the ballot measure that would change the Missouri constitution to “prohibit gender transition procedures for minors,” banning doctors from providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat kids with gender dysphoria.
Trans youth health care is already illegal in Missouri under a law enacted in 2023. But you wouldn’t know that from Amendment 3’s marketing.
Some of the same people who pushed to ban gender-affirming care for Missouri kids in 2023 are now fighting to enshrine that ban in the state’s constitution. Prominent among them is Jamie Reed, a former Washington University Transgender Center clinic employee turned prolific speaker on the anti-trans circuit. “If we talk to people about the trans part of this amendment,” Reed reportedly told a room full of St. Louis County Republicans in September, “we can get it to pass.”
Reed—who spent much of the past 3 years touring state legislatures to push trans care bans nationwide—also became the face of a marketing campaign by the Her Health, Her Future PAC, a group run by Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s wife, Claudia. “I worked in a gender transition clinic, and saw how children are manipulated into undergoing irreversible surgeries,” Reed said. Reed has, notably, failed to back up these statements in court, has had her characterizations of what went on at the clinic where she worked disputed by patients and parents, and is not a medical professional.
But her words are backed by $5.3 million in advertising money, and abortion opponents are counting on her story to resonate with voters: in one 2023 poll, a majority of Missourians supported heavily restricting transition-related care for young people.
Doctors, medical professionals, and canvassers pose for a photo at a Stop the Ban canvassing event in St. Louis, Missouri. Many of those present also canvassed to overturn Missouri’s “trigger ban” just two years earlier. A folding table with snacks for canvassers has a sign on it that reads ‘We are 24 days from Nov. 3.’
A folding table with snacks for canvassers and a sign reading “We are 24 days from Nov. 3.” At least $5.3 million has been spent to promote the abortion ban ballot measure.Theo R. Welling
“The opposition is not talking about abortion because they know they will lose,” said state Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs of St. Louis. “We already won the battle for abortion here in Missouri, and that is why they added gender-affirming care.”
State Rep. Wick Thomas, Missouri’s first nonbinary state legislator, says they’re faced with colleagues wanting to bring up trans kids every day of the week. Republicans don’t necessarily see abortion as a winning issue anymore, even in a conservative state flooded with pro-life money. But fearmongering about trans kids, Thomas said, might still win.
“I’ve had people tell me they’re only attacking the trans community right now because it works, and once it doesn’t, they’ll stop.”
“I think they knew just from the last vote that they couldn’t win on abortion alone, and that because the anti-trans attacks have historically done well for them, they decided to wrap them together, and they’re hoping that that would push it over the edge,” Thomas said.
“I’ve had Republican colleagues tell me, you know, not all of them actually even care about this,” Thomas said. They said that some of their colleagues are “secretly fairly supportive” of trans people. But 53 anti-trans bills were introduced by members of Missouri’s Republican supermajority in the past year. Total abortion bans, by contrast, are not at all popular.
“I’ve had people tell me they’re only attacking the trans community right now because it works, and once it doesn’t, they’ll stop,” Thomas said. “But when you have people’s lives in your hands, that’s an unsatisfying thing to hear.”
“We have voters that we believe are confused,” said Alessia Modjarrad (center), a campaign manager for Stop The Ban. “They consider themselves for abortion—but the language is confusing, and they’re hypothetically voting yes, but really they should be voting no.” Theo R. Welling
Jennifer Smith, OB-GYN, canvasses in south St. Louis with Stop the Ban. When Missouri’s “trigger ban” was active, the number of OB-GYN residency applications in the state dropped by 25 percent.Theo R. Welling
Smith and her daughter joined a group of medical professionals to canvas St. Louis’ Shaw neighborhood. Their materials focused on abortion—if they were asked about trans people, one organizer told me, they would just say that it was already illegal for kids to transition medically. In a liberal community, they found support: an older man ready to vote against the ban, who just needed help finding his polling place; a group of college kids day-drinking on a balcony, chanting “NO ON THREE! NO ON THREE!” and drunkenly congratulating Smith on being a doctor.
“I hope they remember that later,” Smith said. The latest polling shows a razor-thin margin on Amendment 3, with likely no voters just one percentage point ahead of those who plan to vote yes. The measure’s opponents will need all the votes they can get.
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Voters Are Begging Trump to End the War in Iran
The US and Israel’s war on Iran, ongoing since February, has never been particularly popular. But two new polls show that as voters prepare for the November 3 midterm elections, they’re thinking about it—and Americans say it’s priority for it to be over.
An AP-NORC poll released earlier this week shows about seven in ten voters believe the government should prioritize ending the war. Their other primary concern is costs: eight in ten say lowering the cost of living should be one of the highest priorities for the next session of Congress coming up. Those concerns are intertwined: surging fuel prices, airfares, and mortgage rates have cost each American household an average of $2,000, Moody’s estimated this week. The AP-NORC result follows a Fox News poll released in September that found six in ten Americans oppose military action against Iran.
Trump doesn’t seem to care. At a recent campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, the president claimed that “our gas prices are lower than under Obama, and they’re lower than Sleepy Joe Biden.” The average price of a gallon of gas was $2.95 during Obama’s second term. It was $3.47 under Biden. Right now, that same gallon costs about $4.30.
“Iran’s killed many, many Americans, many, many people throughout the world for a long time, they were the bully of the Middle East. They were one of the bullies of the world. They’re not a bully anymore,” Trump went on to say. The death toll in Iran has reached at least 3,400, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; 33,000 people have been injured.
Iran, Trump asserted, is “the worst country in the world—and our gas prices, it’s a small thing to pay.” More than 70 percent of Americans, the Fox News poll found, don’t think Trump has a plan to end the war. But Trump’s already fantasizing about his next war: this time, he wants to attack Cuba.
“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran,” Trump said at an October 23 rally in Fort Myers, Florida. The ongoing US embargo on Cuba—which intensified in January of 2026—has caused the electrical grid to collapse, made basic medications inaccessible, and imposed starvation on the Cuban people. That embargo has been described as an act of siege warfare, but Trump’s threats yesterday to bring warships to Cuba constitute a new level of aggression.
We’ll do a little stopover,” he said. “We’re going to come back from Iran, those beautiful ships. We’ll pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands, and then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the job.”
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