Victoria Ferrell Ortiz learned she was pregnant during summer 2017. The Dallas resident was finishing up an AmeriCorps job with a local nonprofit, which offered her a small stipend to live on but no health coverage. She applied for Medicaid so she could be insured during the pregnancy.
“It was a time of a lot of learning, turnaround, and pivoting for me, because we weren’t necessarily expecting that kind of life change,” she said.