Last natural birth center closes in San Francisco

This is sad news.

On Aug. 5, the Sage Femme Midwifery Service and  Community Childbearing Institute -- Sage Femme for short -- closed with little fanfare or press attention. The clinic on Capp Street, where 100 babies were delivered a year, was run into the ground financially after it saw an increase in Medi-Cal patients and a decrease in insurance payments. 

This leaves San Francisco with exactly zero natural birth facilities.  There are a couple on the East Bay and the Peninsula, and several in the South Bay, and there are homebirth midwives who practice out of San Francisco proper.  However, the loss of Sage Femme means that there are no longer any birth centers where a woman can go to have her child in a natural non-hospital environment.

There is currently a donation drive in place to keep Sage Femme open.