Around 40 union members and registered nurses gathered on a Monday evening under the steady drill of cicadas to protest the impending shutdown of the Research Medical Center’s neonatal intensive care unit and labor and delivery services.
Since HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest hospital system, took over the hospital in 2003, it has “driven away specialized health care providers and moved services to other facilities,” nurses said in an Aug. 4 press release, reducing access to crucial medical care for Missouri’s most vulnerable populations.
The American landscape for women’s healthcare has taken several hits recently. The Trump administration rolled back federal funding for reproductive care and studies on women’s healthcare. Abortion services have now resumed in Missouri after a Jackson County Circuit Court judge blocked the Missouri Supreme Court reinstatement of a “de facto abortion ban” in May 2025, but Republican lawmakers passed a bill to put abortion back on the ballot later this year.
Missouri’s women’s reproductive healthcare system ranked 40th out of 50, according to a 2024 Commonwealth Fund study, and 41.7% of the state’s counties lack sufficient maternity care. The people at Monday’s vigil say the closure of Research Medical’s NICU and labor and delivery services show Missouri’s healthcare options are shrinking.
“This is not just going to impact moms and babies, this is going to trickle down,” said Shalese Clay, president and CEO of Uzazi Village, a family care nonprofit. “Because if they can get rid of this department, they can get rid of any department.”
A study from University of Kansas School of Nursing found that close to 60% of women lack access to “local inpatient maternity services.”
Labor and delivery and NICU services would shut down on Sept. 8, HCA Midwest Health told KCTV. Research Medical CEO Kirk L. McCarty cited an 80% decrease in demand for obstetric care at the hospital. HCA Midwest Health did not respond to KCUR's request for comment.
Margo Fohey, a speaker at the vigil and nurse who has worked at Research Medical for 33 years, said the 80% decrease is real, but it wasn’t because women didn’t need access to Research Medical’s services anymore. Demand in services decreased because HCL “let their OB group go,” she said.
“They bought up the OB group and then decided that they weren’t being productive enough or seeing enough patients on the daily, that it wasn’t profitable enough for them,” Fohey said.
Mayor Pro Tem Ryana Parks-Shaw, SEIU Local 1 members and several nurses who worked at Research Medical Center were also in attendance, along with members from National Nurses United, America’s largest nurses union, were present.
Parks-Shaw spoke about how the closure would impact women with high-risk pregnancies and Black women, who already die at disproportionately higher rates than white women during childbirth.
“I’m here as a mom who’s concerned about her community and about the other moms who may face what I faced before,” Parks-Shaw said. “Because you see in Kansas City, Black mamas and babies are two to three times more likely to have an incident to die from giving birth.”
The vigil attendees, including several children, held signs that said, “Hey HCA, put patients over profits!” Many attendees also wore red, which symbolized nursing, caring and “people with the guts to stand up,” a speaker said.
The hospital signaled it would meet the organizers to discuss “nursing practice,” an organizer said at the end of the vigil.
Olivia Huggins, an emergency room nurse at Research Medical, said the closure of the labor and delivery wing would require nurses who haven’t specialized in neonatal care to take on responsibilities they feel ill-prepared for. Huggins said she’s never delivered a baby.
“I haven’t been trained to do that,” she said. “And now, with this closing in less than a month, they’ve given us approximately five weeks to train over 50 employees in the basics of neonatal resuscitation and emergency labor and everything that goes along with that.”
The closure of Research Medical’s obstetrics services won’t stop patients from coming in to have babies, Huggins said.
“Women take the bus in labor to get to Research,” she said. “It’ll just affect the quality of care that they get, and it really scares me.”
