Angels In America

LeAnn Todd-Langston and Sarah Almon 

Premature births are a growing problem nationwide — now estimated at 10 percent of all deliveries — pushing up the costs of care and the subsequent risk of autism and lifelong illness. But the numbers across the rural American South and lower Midwest are worse. What’s more, 40 percent of all births are paid for by Medicaid. “Sixty-five percent of our women are on Kentucky Medicaid,” Todd-Langston, manager of the Trover Center for Women’s Health, told me. And she expects that number to grow as jobs in the region continue to disappear.
The problem isn’t lack of doctors or even access to standard OB-GYN service. The problem, they realized, begins in the mouths of their patients. “We saw that our women weren’t getting preventative [dental] screening. Gum infections, decayed teeth that weren’t attended to so that by the end of pregnancy they would have full-blown abscesses; we would just hope that didn’t put them into premature labor.”