T he woman on the phone was pregnant with twins and thought she might be in labour. She was two hours from the nearest hospital that could deliver her babies. Dr Cara Syth, the obstetrician on call, didn't tell her to wait and see. There's no waiting and seeing when the nearest unit is hours away and the unknowns of birth are multiplying by the minute. “With being so far away, you have to err on the side of caution”, Dr Syth tells The Independent . The woman drove four hours in total to find she wasn't in labour. If there had been a unit closer, she could have stayed home a little longer, gone in when she was sure. Instead, she drove through the night on a maybe. The family birth centre in Menomonie, Wisconsin – a university town of 16,000 – closed in January 2023. Patients had four months' notice. Women who had been driving thirty minutes to deliver their babies were suddenly looking at hours. Within roughly five years, seven labour and delivery units closed across western Wisconsin, five of them rural.…