This is not the column I hoped I would be writing.

For the past several months, I have stood alongside families, healthcare workers, local leaders, and people from across Lincoln County fighting to keep labor and delivery services at the Miles campus of Lincoln Hospital. We wrote letters. We signed petitions. We rallied. We asked questions. We dug into the numbers. Community members proposed alternatives and offered solutions. People shared some of the most intimate stories of their lives, stories of difficult pregnancies, emergency deliveries, and babies born safely at Miles — because they believed those stories might help save this service for the next family who needs it.

On Aug. 6, despite all of that, the MaineHealth Board of Trustees voted to close the Miles Family Birth Center. And let me tell you that I am angry about that decision. I am heartbroken for the people who fought so hard to prevent it, but I have also come to believe that what happened at Miles is about much more than one hospital or one community.

It has forced us to confront a question Maine has been avoiding for too long: What does it mean to build a future for rural communities if the essential services that make it possible to build a life there keep disappearing?

Miles is not the first labor and delivery unit we have lost. Across Maine, maternity units have been closing for years. Each closure has its own explanation that references staffing shortages, finances, declining birth rates, and changing patient patterns. Those challenges are real and I don’t dispute them. Running a hospital in rural Maine is difficult, and providing around-the-clock maternity care is especially so. But difficult cannot become synonymous with disposable.

There are services we maintain because their value cannot be captured by how many people need them on an average Tuesday. We don’t decide whether a fire department is necessary based only on how many houses caught fire last year. We understand that its value is in being available every time one of those houses caught fire.

Labor and delivery care carries that same responsibility. Pregnancy does not always follow a schedule and labor certainly does not wait for good weather or convenient staffing. Complications do not check whether a family has reliable transportation or whether the nearest remaining hospital is an hour away. And there are variables that can beget consequences beyond the moment someone goes into labor.

If we want young people to stay in Maine, move here, start families here, and put down roots in our rural communities, we have to be honest about what we are asking of them. We cannot spend years talking about Maine’s aging population and workforce shortages while simultaneously allowing the infrastructure young families need to disappear. A community cannot thrive on beautiful scenery and good intentions alone. People need childcare. They need schools. They need housing they can afford. They need jobs. And they need to know that when they decide to have a child, safe care will be within reach.

That is why the loss of Miles feels so much bigger than the closure of one department.

What I watched happen in Lincoln County was extraordinary. People refused to accept that the disappearance of maternity care from their community was simply inevitable, so they organized. Through the incredible work of the Miles Action Coalition and grassroots organizers across the community, they learned hospital finances and staffing models. They brought forward countless ideas, and they asked to be partners in finding a solution. They fought for the ability of the next generation to be born in the community they call home. And while the vote did not go the way we wanted, I don’t believe all of that work was for nothing. Lincoln County has forced a much larger conversation out and into the open.

We now have to decide whether Maine is going to continue responding to maternity closures one at a time, after communities learn that their local unit is at risk, or whether we are finally going to confront this as the statewide crisis it has become.

That conversation cannot belong only to hospital executives or lawmakers. It needs the nurses and doctors who know what it takes to provide this care. It needs EMS professionals who understand what an extra 30 or 60 minutes can mean in an emergency. It needs hospitals trying to make rural healthcare work with limited staff and resources. And, most importantly, it needs the voices of the people who live in the communities affected by these decisions.

On Thursday, Aug. 27, the Legislature’s Health Coverage, Insurance and Financial Services Committee will hold a public hearing on Maine’s labor and delivery crisis. It is an opportunity for Maine people to tell lawmakers what they have experienced, what they are afraid of losing, and what they believe we need to do differently. And you should be there.

I especially hope we hear from the people who don’t normally think of themselves as someone who would testify before the Legislature. The mother who remembers the snowstorm on the night she went into labor. The nurse who knows exactly how thin the staffing situation has become. The young couple wondering whether the community they love is still a place where they can safely start a family. The grandparents who want their children and grandchildren to be able to stay in Maine. You should not need to be a policy expert to have a voice in what the future of your community looks like.

MaineHealth has said it will not close another labor and delivery unit within its system for two years. We should not treat those two years as a reprieve and wait for the clock to run out. We should use them to ask hard questions about how rural maternity care is financed, how we recruit and retain the people who provide it, what responsibilities our healthcare systems have to the communities they serve, and what role the state should play when an essential service is at risk.

And we should be willing to imagine something better than managing the next closure.

The people of Lincoln County fought incredibly hard for Miles. They deserved a different outcome. But because they refused to quietly accept this decision, Maine can no longer quietly accept the larger pattern of closures either.

Miles should not simply become another place on the map where babies used to be born. Let it instead be the place where Maine decided that losing essential care from our rural communities was not inevitable, and where we began to turn the tide.

Mattie Daughtry represents state Senate District 23, Brunswick, Chebeague Island, Freeport, Harpswell, Pownal and part of Yarmouth in the Maine Senate. She also serves as Maine’s Senate president. She can be reached at [email protected] or 207-287-1515.