Your weekend must reads🗞️

👋 Welcome to the weekend, readers of The Short List! I’m Nicole Fallert, and I'm excited to dive into a few of this week's most interesting reads from the Paste BN newsroom. 

🟣 About two million rural women of childbearing age live in maternity care deserts, at least 25 miles away from a labor and delivery unit, a Paste BN analysis found. Women of color are even more vulnerable, statistics show, and the federal government has only recently started to identify the problem. In a four-part series, Paste BN examines the growing lack of maternal health care in America's rural communities of color.

Delivery or death: The lack of accessible women's reproductive health care doesn’t affect communities equally.

• Rooted in history: Experts call today's maternal health disparities and lack of access to care a ''reverberation'' of the history of slavery.
• The Biden administration has renewed attention to this issue. But even with the promise of more funding, rural hospitals can't always afford to keep obstetrics – one of the most expensive and least lucrative services for providers.
• Across communities: Native Americans travel among the farthest in the nation for maternal care. 
• The data says it all: The median distance to a hospital with a labor and delivery ward in urban areas is about nine miles, but in rural areas, it’s more than twice that.

👉 Stay tuned: Part four of this series will be coming out next week! 

Here are more must-reads below 👇 See you next week!