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Four years later, Morgan Griffith still has no answer for Southwest Virginia's maternity care deserts
- 18 hours ago
- 3 min read
In 2024, the March of Dimes released a report identifying Maternity Care Deserts by county across the United States. 11 counties in Southwest Virginia were classified as maternity care deserts, meaning families in those communities face significant barriers to accessing prenatal care, labor and delivery services, and postpartum care close to home.
For years, Morgan Griffith has given the same answer to this problem. “If you find a solution, let me know.” In 2022, after a meeting with healthcare professional in Ridgeway, VA, just outside of Martinsville, Griffith told the Martinsville Bulletin: “I don’t know that we can solve anything, but if you see … a solution, please give us a call.” Martinsville is labeled “Low Access to Maternity Care” in the March of Dimes report.
Griffith recently returned to the Martinsville area on July 15th 2026, when the Henry County Enterprise reported Griffith told local business leaders at a roundtable meeting that he still does not have an answer to the maternity care crisis, stating: “I think that we need to figure out some solution. I don’t have it,” Griffith said. “I’ll look through
my friends in the health care community to help me figure it out.”
Griffith has acknowledged the lack of maternity services across the district but still provides no answer; “There’s a huge group of folks out there who have to travel to get maternity care. So maternity care is a great question. I don’t have an answer for you.”
After the Martinsville roundtable, RBS News Now asked Griffith about maternity care deserts; Griffith’s reply: “There were concerns about healthcare in general, but particularly maternity deserts, which unfortunately Martinsville is a maternity desert. Ways that we might be able to solve that; I would look for some federal legislation but we have to figure out how to pay for it.”
Griffith’s answers seem blissfully unaware that Congress already finances a significant share of maternity care through Medicaid. According to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Medicaid finances more than 40 percent of births in the United States. Rural hospitals also rely heavily on Medicaid reimbursement to keep labor and delivery units financially viable.
That is why Griffith’s healthcare voting record matters.
In 2025, Griffith voted for legislation cutting approximately $911 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years. Maternal health organizations, including the March of Dimes, warned that those reductions would increase financial pressure on rural hospitals and worsen maternity care deserts by making it more difficult to sustain labor and delivery services.
Since those Medicaid reductions were enacted, at least four rural hospitals in Southwest Virginia have been identified as being at risk of closure.
This is not the only example of Griffith refusing to vote for bills that would help the maternity desert issue. In 2017, Griffith voted for the American Health Care Act of 2017, which was the Republican Affordable Care Act repeal proposal.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that under the bill, some states could change essential-health-benefit requirements in way that excluded maternity coverage from some individual-market insurance plans. The CBO has also warned that women needing maternity services could face thousands of dollars in additional out-of-pocket costs.
In 2021, Griffith voted against the American Rescue Plan, which created a state option that allowed Medicaid and CHIP pregnancy coverage to continue for 12 months postpartum instead of only 60 days. The following year, he voted against H.R. 2617, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which made that 12-month postpartum Medicaid option permanent.
Griffith says, as we have seen in present news articles, that he is a supporter of maternal
care and he has supported some bipartisan legislation that would help maternity care deserts but those bills were relatively narrow and did not address the underlying financial pressures facing rural hospitals.
On July 6, 2026, House Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) released a report detailing the state of maternal health one year after the Medicaid cuts that Griffith supported. According to the report, Medicaid finances more than 40 percent of all U.S. births and covers about half of all children.
The report identified over 50 maternal care units that have closed their doors since the enactment of that bill. One of them was a rural hospital in Virginia and another was located in East Tennessee on the border of Southwest Virginia.
Morgan Griffith says he cares about addressing maternity care deserts. But 4 years after acknowledging the problem, he still says he does not have an answer. Unfortunately for his CD9 constituents, Griffith’s healthcare voting record have moved in the opposite direction from what healthcare experts say is required to keep rural maternity services alive.
Morgan Griffith has had over a decade to find an answer – and he has failed every year.
The 9th District needs a representative now who will proactively work to find a solution to this critical healthcare problem.
