THE JOHN F KENNEDY Memorial Medical Center has committed an unforgivable assault on maternal healthcare by implementing draconian fee increases that place life-saving medical services beyond the reach of Liberia’s most vulnerable women. Since July 1, 2025, pregnant women seeking basic obstetric care have been forced to pay $10 per visit, while those requiring gynecological services must produce $20 – sums that represent days of income for market women and subsistence farmers.
THE CRUELTY DEEPENED on August 1 when the hospital began demanding $200 upfront for emergency Caesarean sections, a procedure that often means the difference between life and death for mothers and their babies. These predatory fees constitute economic violence against Liberian womanhood, implemented without transparency or compassion by hospital administrators who refuse to provide justification for their decisions.
DR. LINDA A. BIRCH, the hospital’s Chief Executive Officer, authorized these changes through an internal memo dated June 16, 2025, while showing no apparent concern for how rural women traveling from distant counties would suddenly find themselves priced out of care they could previously access. The policy’s timing could not be more cynical, coming just as Liberia had begun making progress in reducing its maternal mortality rate from 1,749 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 628 in 2023 – gains now threatened by financial barriers that will inevitably delay critical care.
HOSPITAL ADMINISTRATORS DEMONSTRATE shocking indifference as they demand payment receipts before admitting women in labor, prioritizing accounting over compassion in a nation where most citizens survive on less than $2.15 per day. The $200 C-section fee alone breaks down into a $25 admission charge, $90 surgical fee, $65 for medications, and $20 for laboratory tests – an impossible sum for market women who must choose between saving their baby’s life and feeding their other children.
THIS POLICY DOESN’T merely inconvenience patients; it sentences poor women to preventable deaths from conditions like postpartum hemorrhage and obstructed labor while comfortable bureaucrats in Monrovia congratulate themselves on balancing hospital ledgers.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned that limited access to emergency obstetric care remains the primary driver of Liberia’s maternal mortality crisis, yet JFKMC’s leadership has chosen to exacerbate this very problem.
THEIR ACTIONS VIOLATE both the spirit and letter of Liberia’s commitments under international agreements like the Maputo Protocol, which guarantees women’s right to health care services. While wealthy Liberians will easily absorb these costs, the policy effectively declares that poor women’s lives matter less – a dangerous precedent that undermines our nation’s professed values of equality and justice.
WHAT MAKES THESE fee increases particularly unconscionable is their disproportionate impact on vulnerable groups. Teenage mothers abandoned by their partners, rural women who must travel for days to reach medical facilities, and survivors of sexual violence seeking gynecological care all face impossible choices under this new regime. The hospital’s insistence on upfront payments shows no understanding of Liberia’s economic realities, where families often need weeks to gather emergency funds through community savings groups or predatory loans.
WE CALL FOR immediate action from Health Dr. Louise M. Kpoto and President Joseph Boakai to reverse these dangerous policies before more lives are lost. We demand transparent accounting of how previous hospital funding was spent, the establishment of sliding-scale fees based on income, and emergency exemptions for life-threatening conditions. Liberia cannot claim to be making progress on maternal health while simultaneously erecting financial barriers that will inevitably lead to more women dying in childbirth.
THE TIME HAS come for our leaders to demonstrate whether they truly value Liberian women’s lives, or whether they will remain silent accomplices to this institutionalized neglect. History will judge our nation by how we respond to this moment – will we protect our mothers, or sacrifice them on the altar of fiscal austerity?
