Labora Rounds · The intelligence engine

We went looking for the data. It’s there — not hidden, just ignored.

Labora Rounds is the machine we built to watch women’s health across America and write down what’s breaking — one checked fact at a time. It’s our crown jewel, and it does one thing very well: it names the problem, out loud, before anyone else will.

18,403,277
Records under management
79
Public data sources
35
Automated pipelines running
3,139
Counties measured
New · Interactive · All 51 states

More healthy babies are going to intensive care.

Full-term, normal weight, single birth — the newborns nobody expects to need a NICU. Between 2016 and 2024 the share of them admitted to one rose in 46 of 51 states. In Mississippi it nearly doubled. Built from federal birth records; every state, every year.

Explore the map →
New · Interactive · Through 2025 Q4

Infant mortality is falling. Newborn mortality is not.

Split the first year of life in two and almost all the improvement is in the later part. Deaths in the first 28 days — the part that reflects pregnancy, delivery and newborn care — fell every year to 2021 and have not fallen once since.

See the series →
Why it exists

Every birth worker already feels it. We went and found the proof.

Ask any midwife, any OB, any doula: something is going badly wrong for women in this country. The official line is that nothing much has changed. The numbers say otherwise — but the numbers are scattered across a hundred government databases, in a language no normal person is meant to read.

So we did the boring, unglamorous thing. We pulled the records together. We checked them. And we started writing down what they add up to, plainly, as it happens.

“What made the 2008 prophets right wasn’t that they had information no one else had. It’s that they bothered to look.”

We just might be those people.

What it actually is

Thirty-six things we watch. Every single day.

From where the obstetricians are, to which laws just changed, to which hospital just closed its delivery ward. Each one is a live watch-list. The colored dot shows how loud the alarm is right now.

Calm Watch Alert Critical
Clinical care Policy & law Economics Insurance Clinical trials Drug safety FemTech devices Guidelines Federal agencies Immigration Practice Workforce Care deserts Equity Maternal deaths Infant outcomes Mental health Contraception Abortion access Courts State bills Data privacy Clinical AI Research funding Market Hospital closures Quality Doula policy Lactation Menopause Criminalization Global Misinformation Training pipeline
4×

Every fact is checked four times before we’ll stand behind it — and re-checked on a schedule, because the truth moves. That’s the difference between a hot take and intelligence you can quote in a courtroom or a newsroom.

The Signal Intelligence Stream

When enough facts point the same way, they become a Signal.

The Stream is the public feed where the diagnosis shows up — newest first, in plain language. Each entry is a Signal Card: a real thing that just happened to women’s health, written so anyone can read it and cite it.

How to read a Signal Card
  • The tag & alarm color — what kind of thing it is, and how urgent.
  • “The headline — what happened, in one plain sentence.
  • ↑The trend — getting worse, holding, or getting better.

On the full card, our team also writes what it means, what you can do, and why it matters — four plain-language lines, no jargon.

Maternal deaths ↑ Worsening
PRAMS funding expires April 2026 — the only U.S. maternal surveillance system is at risk.

What it means: This is the only nationwide system that tracks why mothers die and get hurt around childbirth. Federal funding lapses in weeks — and if it goes dark, we stop being able to count.

Source: CMS / CDC · verified
Recent signals
See the full stream ↗
Equity↑ Worsening
New CDC data: the Black maternal mortality gap widens to 3.2×.
CDC WONDER · May 21
Care deserts↑ Worsening
12 counties lost their last labor & delivery unit in 2026.
March of Dimes · May 23
Abortion access↔ Watching
Shield-law challenge reaches the Fourth Circuit; ruling expected this quarter.
PACER · May 26
Hospital closures↑ Worsening
Rural hospital system files Chapter 11 — 4 OB units affected.
SEC filing · May 22
Criminalization↑ Worsening
Three new prosecutions of pregnancy outcomes filed this month.
Court watch · May 24
Clinical care↔ Holding
ACOG updates its postpartum hemorrhage management protocol.
ACOG · May 24
Put it to work

A Signal names what’s breaking. These tools let you act on it.

The same checked data behind the Stream powers real tools you can click through — built for the woman in the room, not the analyst.

The map · workforce

The birth-worker crisis

Every county in the country, colored in. At least 1,076 have no hospital that delivers babies. Zoom to your state and click any county.

Open the county map →
3.5×
1×
The map · mortality

The racial mortality gap

Black moms die having babies 3.5 times as often as white moms — and worse in some places. See where the gap is widest.

Open the disparity map →
365
The tool · trials

Find a trial you can join

Type in your health problem and your state. We show you studies you can join right now — in plain words, with who to call. And why it matters that we show up.

Open the trial finder →
The figure · a century

The 1990 divergence

Eleven rich countries spent a century making birth safer together. Then one line turned back up. Only ours.

Watch the fork open →
The figure · newborn intensive care

The healthiest babies are rising fastest

Admission to newborn intensive care rose 17% among full-term, normal-weight babies between 2016 and 2024 — more than three times the rise among babies born early. 46 of 51 states moved the same way.

See the figure →
4.05M
women of childbearing age live in a county with no hospital that delivers.
3.5×
as often a Black mom dies having a baby than a white mom.
1,076
U.S. counties — at least — with no hospital that delivers babies.
Where this leads

Labora Rounds is the diagnosis. Labora Collective is the response.

Rounds finds what’s breaking and says it plainly. The Collective is what we build with it — the journals, the guides, the community turning a diagnosis into a way forward for real women and the people who care for them.

Visit Labora Collective ↗ Explore all 36 domains →