Taking care of pregnant mothers

Prenatal care respects dignity of unborn children

By Andrew Junker | Oct. 1, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

GOODYEAR — It was an early Wednesday morning Sept. 9, but the large trailer hooked up to a big, red pick-up truck was already humming in the parking lot of St. John Vianney Parish.

Inside the trailer, two registered nurses and one nurse practitioner were getting ready for the day, reviewing charts, looking at scheduled appointments and having a quick breakfast.

Soon, anywhere between 10 and 30 pregnant women would enter the trailer-turned-medical center and receive prenatal care — for free.

The Maternity Outreach Mobile Unit — or MOMobile for short — has been providing free medical care to pregnant women for the past 15 years. It receives private donations and grants to cover operation costs, and serves mostly poor, immigrant women.

“This is specifically for people who don’t have health insurance or otherwise wouldn’t have prenatal care,” said Peggy Yancy, a nurse practitioner who works in the MOMobile.

It’s an important outreach for St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, which years ago found itself delivering babies of mothers who had no prenatal care and were suffering the consequences of it.

“Research really supports prenatal care in terms of decreasing the risk for both mom and baby,” Yancy said. “It’s not just those initial risks right after delivery, it’s long term. It’s those neuro-developmental delays that kids will then have in school, if they had problems in birth.”

The problems associated with lack of prenatal care isn’t limited to the newborns, either. Mothers-to-be without proper attention can suffer from poor nutrition, anemia, preeclampsia, high blood pressure or gestational diabetes.

For many of the women, it’s as simple as giving them their prenatal vitamins and telling them to drink plenty of water.

“For many of these women, this is the only time they get health care,” Yancy said. “A lot of times, we can pick up problems that are going to be chronic problems or long-term problems for the moms and then filter them out to the community where there might be services for them.”

A welcoming place

The mobile unit boasts a small waiting area with a couch and television, two examination rooms — one of which has an ultrasound machine — and a broom-closet-sized office. There’s always a doctor whom the unit has on call, and when it comes time, the mothers deliver their babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

The MOMobile is a small, but welcoming place, which the patients appreciate, the nurses said.

“A lot of women become like family to the MOMobile,” said Antonieta Salomon, a registered nurse with the unit. “We might have seen one particular patient and she tells her cousin and she tells someone else. We don’t really advertise. It’s all based on the community and who has had services here.”

Rocio Orozco was one of the women who heard about the MOMobile from a friend. She’s pregnant with her second child, after having delivered her first in Mexico.

“I wouldn’t have known where to go,” Orozco said of the center. “It’s important because there’s a lot of Hispanic women here who don’t know to manage these things in this country. Here, they give you immediate attention.”

Marilu Jimenez agreed. She is on AHCCCS — Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state’s Medicaid program. Like so many others, she heard about the MOMobile from a friend.

Pregnant with her first child, Jimenez said she was initially scared, but that the nurses really helped her feel more comfortable with the world of motherhood she was about to enter.

“It was kind of crazy,” she said. “But the nurses were really nice and supportive.”

Double blessings

It also helps that the mobile unit is often parked near Catholic parishes or community centers. It makes the women — a vast majority of whom are undocumented — feel safe getting the care they need.

“We’re at this church, it’s a safe place, a welcoming place,” said Margarita Montijo. “We became part of these communities.”

“They’re comfortable with us. We speak their language,” Salomon said. “We don’t care if they’re here legally or illegally, that doesn’t matter to us. All we care about is that they deliver a healthy baby, that they receive the prenatal care, that we put them in the right direction.”

Sr. Ignacia Carrillo, FMA, serves as principal at St. John Vianney Catholic School and is a big supporter of the MOMobile. She said it fits in nicely with the parish’s ethos.

“We don’t only evangelize spiritually,” she said. “Our families get concrete services.”

Sr. Ignacia said the mobile unit is a great sign of solidarity in the Church. Having the MOMobile on site sends a message to the community and the school children who see it parked in the lot every Wednesday.

“I see so many blessings in all of this,” she said. “If we are open and welcoming, God will bless our ministry. If we open our doors to those in need, especially the unborn, God will bless us.”

The program also makes fiscal sense for the state, Yancy said. Hospitals were often spending more money caring for newborns or mothers who had ailments that could easily have been addressed with prenatal care.

Now, the MOMobile average birth weight is higher than the state’s average, and they’re helping put a whole generation of women on the right nutritional path, which may reduce the high rate of diabetes Hispanic women suffer later in life.

“We bring healthy babies into the world,” Montijo summed up her job. “How much better can that get?”

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J.D. Long-García contributed to this story.