-Over the last decade, nearly 50 maternity wards have closed across California.

17 of those closures are in LA County, including maternity wards at Centinela Hospital Medical Center and Memorial Hospital of Gardena Medical Center, both of which serve the highest proportion of Black patients in the state.

Meanwhile, Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital has one of the last maternity wards left in South Los Angeles, and it's struggling to stay open.

The hospital loses more than $2 million annually on its maternity ward.

-Imagine one hospital for all the communities in this area.

That's just an impossible task to ask the hospital to do.

-Why the closures?

It's partly because delivering babies is expensive.

When hospitals are trying to save money, maternity care is usually one of the first services to get cut.

California's public insurance program, Medi-Cal, which covers half of all births statewide, has the fifth lowest reimbursement rate for maternity care in the United States.

Meanwhile, private insurance pays roughly five times more for an uncomplicated natural delivery.

In the LA area, closures overwhelmingly took place in hospitals where up to 80 percent of patients had Medi-Cal.

Low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately affected, a CalMatters analysis found.

These populations have some of the worst birth outcomes in the state.

Doctors say the recent closures have caused care delays because the remaining maternity wards have to absorb new patients, sometimes overwhelming them.

If MLK were to close its maternity ward, patients would have to travel farther for prenatal care, delivery, and postpartum services, barriers that often affect whether a pregnant patient sees a provider at all.

For CalMatters, I'm Kristen Hwang.