Health care icon laments MDI Hospital decision to close birthing unit

BAR HARBOR, April 9, 2025 - One of my favorite signs on the island is in the small outdoor bar at Eat-A-Pita in Southwest Harbor:

“DON’T PISS OFF THE REDHEAD!”

Linda Robinson is pissed off. She’s not a redhead, but she’s pissed off.

The source of her discontent is the closing of the birthing unit at MDI Hospital.

The problem for women’s health care on MDI and rural America is bigger and more profound, she believes.

“I needed to express what I feel is an important link in this fight to preserve a vital service in women’s health, “ Robinson stated on her weekly blog.

“The issue keeps being framed as a financial one. Hospitals say they cannot afford to keep the maternity service open. Yet, they are building expensive new buildings and emergency room services. I believe we must stop framing this as a financial issue and describe it as the human rights abuse it is.

“It will change the narrative and highlight a broader problem. Rural areas are eliminating a vital service, one which will be needed until the end of time. Nothing about childbirth will ever change.

“The protocols have changed. We’ve made it unnecessarily expensive due to insurance rates. The medical establishment has blocked safe midwifery care, even though, or maybe because, midwives provide safer less expensive care to women. We’ve subjected women to unnecessary surgeries for profit and convenience. We watch as maternal mortality rates rise because of limited access to care. And STILL hospitals eliminate this service making it harder and harder to get care!! What the actual FUCK?”

If Robinson were a gadfly given to overreaction, this might have been just another footnote in the slow dismemberment of another village on Mount Desert Island.

The problem for the hospital, its trustees and administrators is that the public optics was about as bad as one can imagine for how they handled the closing.

Robinson is arguably the most renowned health care professional to come out of MDI.

She has written an acclaimed book, and practiced midwifery in American Samoa, during a war in the Congo and on a Fulbright Fellowship in Malawi.

She was a founding member of the Lisa Stewart Women’s Center at MDI Hospital. which hospital CEO Chrissi Maguire acknowledged during the April 4 one-hour “town hall” meeting the hospital hurriedly arranged to address the community backlash to the closing.

She appeared on Ted Talk to preach her gospel to eliminate maternal mortality in the wealthiest country on the planet.

Robinson is veteran of the internecine politics in a hospital.

She said in an interview that a doctor at the hospital refused to work with a midwife in the early Nineties when the women’s center was just getting started.

“He was an asshole, and he said, If you hire a midwife, I will quit.”

There were other MDI doctors who challenged the changing status quo including one who was arrested in November 2017 for domestic abuse.

Robinson has a unique lens into the history of women’s health care in Maine the last 30 years.

She recalled the case which changed insurance rates in Maine - a 2002 incident in Lewiston when hospital staff failed to take emergency actions when a 16-year-old gave birth to a baby with cerebral palsy because of the lack of oxygen.

The lawsuit which ensued resulted in an $8 million jury award, then the second largest malpractice judgement in Maine history.

“Everything changed with that one case. It was huge, which is probably nothing now, but everything changed then."

“So what has changed? Has the need for the service changed? No reimbursement has changed.

“We don't know what's going to happen in the future. Insurance could change, and they could be reimbursing for childbirth better than they are now.

“So to make this kind of a decision based on this little window, you're losing money. So what? Figure it out. You know what? Figure it out, you don't eliminate a vital service because the reimbursement screwed up.

“When I graduated from nursing school, you would be in the hospital for two weeks if you needed to get your gallbladder out? Technology changes? Treatments, medical treatments change, and the facilities have to evolve with that.

“What is never going to change is childbirth. It's never going to be any different. So that’s the one service that we're going to eliminate? I get the insurance issues, the whole safety thing, it's not about safety. It's like the safety numbers here are very good. It's about the insurance saying this is what you have to do to be safe.”

CORRECTIONS and AMPLIFICATIONS:

• In a article April 1, I incorrectly reported the venue of the reception when I heard hospital CEO Chrissi Maguire thank Leonard Leo for sponsoring the hospital fund-raising event. It was at a different venue. I stand by my position of not donating to the hospital as long as it accepts money from Leo.

• Bar Harbor resident Bryan Zavestoski objected to my characterizing him as being on a list of “well-known” business people seeking to be on the Town Council tourism task force. He said he worked as a retail clerk for Acadia Shops for two years up to 2018. He wrote that he shares much of the expressed sentiments of David Kief, who is running for Town Council. “His comment about us being ‘stewards of the most beautiful place on the East Coast’ resonates a lot though. The town, residents, and businesses can all be doing more to maintain the natural beauty and accessibility for year round people, and I think residents should have more of a voice.”