The definition belongs to March of Dimes
A maternity care desert, as March of Dimes uses the term, is a place with no hospital or birth center offering obstetric care and no obstetric clinician. Its 2026 report sets the classification out as a table. A county is a desert at zero birthing facilities and zero obstetric clinicians per 10,000 births, and rises through low, moderate and full access above that, with a further test on the share of women aged 19 to 54 without health insurance[4]. Obstetric clinicians there means obstetrician gynecologists, certified nurse midwives and certified midwives, and family physicians who reported delivering babies.
Nationally the report classes 1,113 counties, 34.6 percent of the 3,219 it covers, as deserts, home to 2.4 million women of reproductive age who gave birth to nearly 149,000 infants in 2024[4]. The Kansas classification is not in the report. The county maps are images, and the word Kansas appears once in the report, inside a citation.
The Kansas measurement, and who actually made it
The Kansas figure comes from a 2025 issue brief published by the University of Kansas School of Nursing in collaboration with the Center for Rural Health, with contract funding from the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund. On its bedded facilities pages it states that 59 percent of Kansas counties have no inpatient obstetrical services and that 41 percent have no prenatal care services, on data from 2023[1].
The 41 percent is the number the state repeats. The Rural Health Transformation Program application KDHE submitted in November 2025 says that over 46 percent of Kansas women live in a maternal care desert and that 41 percent of Kansas counties do not have maternity care services, and its end note points at the same university report[5]. The state is quoting a university brief, not counting independently.
Two of the report's own qualifications travel with its figures. It says its data are from 2022, 2023 and 2024, and that facilities in western Kansas have since closed or paused both prenatal and labor and delivery services[1]. Its executive summary also attaches that same 59 percent to Kansans rather than to counties, while the body page attaches it to counties. This page uses the body page.
The report also counts 42 Kansas counties with no documented anesthesia provider, which matters because the account of what a maternity unit requires includes anesthesiologists or nurse anesthetists available around the clock to perform cesarean sections when they are needed[1][6].
How many rural Kansas hospitals still deliver
The state-by-state maternity table gives Kansas 36 rural hospitals still providing labor and delivery in 2026 and 67 with none, which it renders as 35 percent[2]. Those two add to 103, which is exactly the number of open Kansas rows in the separate hospital-level table from the same organization, so both are describing the same set of buildings[7].
Nationally, 40 percent of rural hospitals still offer labor and delivery, and 146 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies or announced they will stop before the end of 2026[6]. Kansas at 35 percent is below the national share on units retained. Its own closure count over that period is three, which the table renders as 8 percent of its rural hospital labor and delivery units[2]. Those two point in opposite directions. Kansas keeps a smaller share of its units than the country does, and has lost a smaller share of them since the end of 2020.
Seven of the 36 remaining Kansas units, 19 percent of them, fall into the at-risk category. The test is specific and it is not about obstetrics: the hospital lost money on all patient services in both of the two most recent years available and also had a negative total margin in both years[2].
| Measure | Kansas |
|---|---|
| Rural hospitals with labor and delivery services in 2026 | 36 |
| Share of rural hospitals with labor and delivery | 35% |
| Rural hospitals with no labor and delivery in 2026 | 67 |
| Units closed or announced closed since the end of 2020 | 3 |
| Share of rural hospital units closed | 8% |
| Median driving time to a hospital with labor and delivery | 32 minutes |
| Median driving time to an alternative hospital | 41 minutes |
| Units at risk of closing | 7 |
| Share of units at risk of closing | 19% |
The mileage, measured two incompatible ways
One measure is driving time. The Kansas row gives a median of 32 minutes from a rural hospital without labor and delivery to the nearest hospital that has it, and a median of 41 minutes to an alternative labor and delivery hospital[2].
The other is straight-line distance from the center of a ZIP code, and the University of Kansas report says outright that its figures do not reflect the roads a pregnant woman would travel. On that basis 13 percent of Kansas ZIP codes are more than 30 miles from the nearest facility offering delivery services and 46 percent are more than 15 miles, with a mean of 16 miles. For high-risk maternity or neonatal services the figures are 75 percent beyond 30 miles and a maximum of 283 miles, and the report identifies a single location in Kansas with Level IV perinatal capability, in the Kansas City metro[1].
A 32-minute median drive and a 16-mile mean straight line are answers to different questions and cannot be added, averaged or compared. Both are in the record and both are on this page for that reason.
The report names the two counties it ranks highest for relative need. Wallace County and Grant County both sit on the western edge and neither has a health system offering maternity care. Their approximate straight-line distances to inpatient maternity care are 50 miles and 24 miles[1].
What the state records and does not print
There were 33,956 live births to Kansas residents in 2024, a decrease of 0.2 percent on the year before, in KDHE's Annual Summary of Vital Statistics for that data year, published in December 2025[3]. The same volume publishes births by county of residence, by age of mother, by weeks of gestation and by final route of delivery, and reports 10,215 cesarean deliveries, 30.1 percent of the births for which the route was known.
It does not publish births by county of occurrence or by facility. The Kansas birth certificate carries a place-of-birth field offering hospital, freestanding birthing center and home birth, so the state holds the information[3]. It is simply not tabulated in the annual summary, which is the volume a reader would go to. A count of Kansas counties in which a baby was delivered in 2024 would answer the desert question directly. The summary names its producer on the title page as a KDHE bureau, Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics, and a count of that kind would have to come from there[3]. Until one appears, every page reachable from this publication's front page that touches Kansas maternity access is working from percentages somebody else derived, on data gathered in 2023.