Miami Valley Hospital records 17 pregnant nurses in labor and delivery

Seventeen labor and delivery nurses at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, were pregnant at the same time, setting a new record inside a unit that already spends its days helping other families welcome newborns. Fifteen of the 17 posed together for a hospital photo in matching uniforms, a striking snapshot of how closely the pregnancies overlapped.

The figure topped the hospital’s previous record of 11 pregnant nurses at once, a mark set in 2019. That earlier group later reunited after giving birth, adding a second chapter to a coincidence that already had made the Dayton hospital stand out within Premier Health, the system that runs Miami Valley Hospital.

The nurses who spoke about the experience included Rileigh Batten and Kelby Strapp Meese. Batten said she kept finding out more and more coworkers were pregnant with her, a detail that underscored how widely the pregnancies spread through the same labor and delivery team. Meese said the first trimester was especially hard because of morning sickness that lasted all day, while the second trimester was better.

The overlap is more than a novelty. A labor and delivery unit runs around the clock, and when a large share of the staff is pregnant at once, the hospital has to balance patient care with leave, shifts and coverage inside the same department that delivers babies for other families. The record at Miami Valley Hospital showed that the timing of those pregnancies clustered in a way few hospitals would ever see, let alone manage twice in a single decade.

ABC News noted that 15 of the 17 expecting nurses gathered for the photo, while local coverage dated June 25 and updated June 26, 2026, identified the hospital record as a new high for the unit. The 2019 group of 11 nurses, once pregnant together, later came back together after giving birth, turning an internal staffing quirk into a recurring milestone for the Dayton hospital.