Obstetric delivery capacity
Of 4,658 hospitals in the CMS Care Compare maternal health file, 2,357 confirm they provide inpatient labour and delivery care and 1,330 confirm they do not. For 971 of them, CMS reports no value at all. Those are hatched on every map here, and they are not folded into either group.
Delivering hospitals by county
Counties are drawn from Census cartographic boundary files (2023, 1:20,000,000) and projected to an Albers equal-area conic at build time. This map contains no JavaScript mapping library, loads no external resource, and makes no network request. Hatched counties are withheld at source — they are not zero and they are not estimated.
Figure 1. Hatched counties contain hospitals whose obstetric service status CMS does not report, and no confirmed delivering hospital. They are not zero. Colouring them zero would put an obstetric desert on the map where the data simply stops.
- Confirmed to provide labour & delivery
- 2,3572,263 meet Birthing Friendly criteria; 94 provide the care but do not
- Confirm they do not provide it
- 1,330an explicit "not applicable" on SM-7
- Status not reported
- 971hatched everywhere on this site
- Counties with births but no confirmed delivering hospital
- 1,217296,913 births to their residents
Counties with births and no confirmed delivering hospital
1,217 counties recorded births in 2024 and contain no hospital confirmed to provide inpatient labour and delivery, covering 296,913 births.
What this does not mean
It does not mean those residents had no obstetric care. Births are counted by county of residence; delivery happens wherever the hospital is. In most of these counties residents deliver in an adjacent county, which is ordinary and unremarkable. What the figure describes is the distance between where births are recorded and where obstetric facilities sit — a logistics fact, not a quality one, and certainly not a legal one.
| County | State | Births 2024 | Population 2024 | Lawyer offices |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berkeley County | SC | 3,035 | 264,276 | 68 |
| Gloucester County | NJ | 3,032 | 311,783 | 84 |
| Kaufman County | TX | 2,754 | 197,829 | 28 |
| Shelby County | AL | 2,469 | 235,969 | 78 |
| Johnson County | TX | 2,411 | 210,547 | 39 |
| Sarpy County | NE | 2,402 | 204,828 | 24 |
| Clermont County | OH | 2,166 | 214,123 | 34 |
| Lake County | OH | 2,050 | 232,360 | 66 |
| Paulding County | GA | 1,911 | 188,549 | 29 |
| Harnett County | NC | 1,822 | 146,096 | 30 |
| Livingston Parish | LA | 1,818 | 152,886 | 28 |
| Randall County | TX | 1,771 | 150,547 | 23 |
| Columbia County | GA | 1,708 | 167,472 | 47 |
| Boone County | KY | 1,686 | 144,135 | 25 |
| Livingston County | MI | 1,658 | 196,976 | 61 |
| York County | ME | 1,621 | 220,143 | 74 |
| Bossier Parish | LA | 1,609 | 131,102 | 34 |
| Medina County | OH | 1,577 | 184,625 | 60 |
| Liberty County | TX | 1,528 | 115,042 | 29 |
| Kendall County | IL | 1,507 | 143,171 | 19 |
How service status was determined
| SM-7 value as reported by CMS | Facilities | How we classify it |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | 2,263 | Provides inpatient labour and delivery and meets the Birthing Friendly criteria |
| No | 94 | Provides inpatient labour and delivery; does not meet the criteria |
| Not Applicable (our hospital does not provide inpatient labor/delivery care) | 1,330 | Does not provide labour and delivery |
| Not Available | 971 | Unknown. Hatched. Never assigned to any of the above. |
| Limit | Detail |
|---|---|
| Coverage is the CMS file, not the universe of facilities | Hospitals outside CMS quality reporting — including some federal, military and specialty facilities — are absent. Freestanding birth centres are not in this file at all. |
| Attestation, not audit | SM-7 is a reported structural measure. It records what a hospital attests to, not an inspection finding. |
| Delivery volume is not published here | The file records whether a hospital provides the service, not how many births it handles. We do not estimate volume from bed count or any other proxy. |
| County assignment | By the facility’s own county string, normalised. Connecticut facilities are mapped from town to planning region because CMS still files against counties the state abolished in 2022. See Methodology. |
A limit we will not cross. Nothing on this page links a clinical outcome rate to a legal claim. Adverse-event rates measure medicine. Litigation measures a legal process. They are different quantities, they are collected by different agencies for different reasons, and correlating them would be the fastest way to publish something false. Where we present clinical data and legal data together, it is to describe a market — never to imply that one causes, predicts, or justifies the other.
Sources
- CMS Care Compare — Maternal Health · Hospital — PC-02, PC-07a, PC-07b, SM-7; 2024 reporting period
- CMS Care Compare — Hospital General Information — ownership, facility type, Birthing Friendly designation
- CMS — Birthing-Friendly Hospital Designation — designation criteria
- U.S. Census Bureau — County Population Totals and Components of Change, Vintage 2024 — births by county, 2021–2024
- CMS Care Compare — Footnote Crosswalk — definitions for suppression codes
Cite this analysis
Free to reproduce with attribution, including commercially. Charts may be embedded as published.
Birth Injury Marketing. “Obstetric delivery capacity.” 24 August 2026. https://birthinjurymarketing.com/intelligence/delivery-capacity/
Journalists and researchers: we will cut this data to your specification — by state, by county, by hospital, by year — and send the underlying CSV, free and without conditions. Ask for a custom cut. We will also tell you what the data cannot support.
Elsewhere in the intelligence layer
Births & delivery volume
Where babies are actually born — county-complete, no suppression.
Outcome measures: the blackout
CMS published zero hospital obstetric outcome scores for 2024. All of them.
Legal market capacity
Offices of Lawyers against births, and what that measure cannot tell you.
Malpractice climate
Incomplete, and the page says why rather than filling the gap.
How this was built, and what we could not get → · Model your own market → · All states →
Authorship & review
- Author
- Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing Officer. Credentials.
- Last reviewed
- Corrections
- Found an error? Tell us and it goes in the dated corrections log, whether or not it flatters us.