MENDOCINO Co., 9/25/21 — Around 11 a.m. on April 19, 2020, Susana Macias, a registered dietician at Mendocino Coast Clinics (MCC) in Fort Bragg, was working when she started having contractions more than two weeks earlier than expected. As the contractions became more pronounced, Macias called her husband. Then she alerted the hospital that she was on her way.
A month earlier, Macias could have driven two minutes to the Mendocino Coast District Hospital’s Labor and Delivery Center in Fort Bragg where she had been planning to have her second child. The contentious shuttering of the coast’s only labor and delivery center on April 1 2020 left Macias and other birthing parents with only one choice in Mendocino County. The couple headed to Adventist Health hospital in Ukiah on Highway 20, more than an hour’s drive away on a snaking mountainous road.
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