In Texas’s Maternity Care Deserts, Nurses Offer Vital Help

Beside Angel Perez’s plate of congealing cheese fries sit what look like four disembodied wombs—rubber cross sections depicting the progression of a woman’s pregnancy. The seventeen-year-old plucks one fetus from its uterus and cradles it in her palm, petting it with her finger. It’s the size of a baby mouse, typical of human development ten weeks after fertilization. Across the table, nurse Lauri Mannon gestures at the next-biggest womb, the week-sixteen model. “You’re somewhere between these two,” she tells Perez, who is fourteen weeks pregnant, before hoisting a fifth womb, the forty-week version, up from the floor. Perez’s big brown eyes widen at the sight of the fully formed fetus, with its discernible features and tiny fingers and toes. It’s early November and only the second…

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