$11M Brooklyn Birthing Center To Combat Maternal Mortality, BP Says

BROOKLYN, NY — A hospital that spurred concern about maternal mortality rates in the Black community will get $11 million to build a new birthing center aimed at improving its services, according to the borough president.

Borough President Antonio Reynoso announced Tuesday that he will give all $45 million of his capital funding this year to improving maternal healthcare at Brooklyn's public hospitals, starting with an $11 million birthing center at Woodhull Hospital.

The North Brooklyn hospital made headlines in 2020 when a Black pregnant woman died during routine tests. Studies show that Black pregnant people are 9.4 times more likely to die due to childbirth complications than their white counterparts, the borough president said.

“I look forward to working with NYC Health + Hospitals leadership, specifically at Woodhull and Brooklyn’s two other public hospitals, to ensure my ambitious capital funding yields results in lives saved," Reynoso said. "I’m confident that within four years, the conversation around maternal mortality in Brooklyn will be vastly different thanks to this allocation and the tireless work being done by our public health system.”

At Woodhull, Reynoso's funding will go toward a new birthing center, renovating private labor and birthing rooms, upgrading triage and ante-partum rooms and enhancing the nurse's station and post anesthesia care unit, officials said.

The new design also includes a new OB stimulation lab and enlarged modernized operating rooms for cesarean births.

Local Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Jennifer Gutiérrez also contributed to upgrades at Woodhull with $1.78 million and $500,000, according to the BP.

The new Woodhull facilities will come almost exactly two years after 26-year-old Sha-Asia Semple died in childbirth at the Woodhull Medical Center on July 3, 2020 after going in for routine tests a few days before her due date, according to reports. Semple was induced and gave birth to a healthy baby girl, but went into cardiac arrest soon after an epidural, according to the reports.

Her death sparked an investigation of a former Woodhull anesthesiologist who gave the epidural and outrage over racial disparities Black women face when giving birth.

“Every expecting family deserves access to high-quality health care no matter the color of their skin or the language they speak,” Mayor Eric Adams said of the Woodhull investment. “The root causes of racial disparities in maternal health are real, and we need all hands on deck to stamp out the inequities that have allowed children and mothers to die at the exact time when we should be welcoming a life."

The borough president-funding hospital upgrades come after Reynoso created a Maternal Health Taskforce earlier this year. He said this week that this administration will also work on supporting outpatient services, social services, health insurance access and other underlying issues faced by people of color.