I can’t ever write from the experience of the parent who does the much harder and scarier job of giving birth to a baby.
I can only be a marginalized bit player, the one who grabs the ice chips, gets the nurse, lamely gives the encouragement, rubs the back, and before all that the one who tagged along at Lamaze class and gave up drinking for support when she had to.
What I can tell you is this. A woman giving birth at even the finest, most caring hospital still goes through hell.
The anxiety of waiting, the jaded nurse who’s seen this 3,000 times and forgets it’s this frightened woman’s first, the OBGYN who you thought you had such a great rapport with showing up only at the final moment to catch the baby, the exhaustion while still being woken up just to take vitals and draw blood and the lactation specialist making you feel like a failure in front of your hungry newborn.
Then at some point you get the bill and you realize the hospital stay was the easy part.
Photo by Carlo Navarro on Unsplash
New Jersey ranks second for the cost of giving birth
Fair Health is a nonprofit organization that looks to bring transparency to the cost of healthcare. They just released their fourth annual Cost of Giving Birth Tracker.
As is often the case these prices lag about a year for all the data to come in.
What they found was the median in-network cost for a traditional vaginal birth in the U.S. was $15,728. A C-section? $19,911.
What’s significant is that was a one year increase of 3.6%.
But what of New Jersey? A state where everything and anything seems to cost more than it should?
According to nj.com, we are the second-most expensive state in the nation to give birth.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
NJ childbirth costs are 50% above the national average
The median hospital bill for a vaginal delivery in the Garden State is staggering $23,277. That’s 50% higher than the national average.
For a C-section here the cost is $27,697. At least we’re sixth most expensive in that category.
The cost of having a baby doesn’t end at the hospital
So before you even have the sticker shock of the clothes that last for only three months, the toys that promise to make them a genius, the food, the diapers that you can’t wait until they outgrow because maybe that’s your monthly car payment right there, you have the second-highest cost in the nation before you even taken home from the hospital.
Alaska is number one by the way. Somehow I doubt that makes mom and dad feel any better.
The post above reflects the thoughts and observations of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski. Any opinions expressed are Jeff’s own.
LOOK: Popular children’s books published the year you were born
Stacker compiled a list of popular children’s books published every year between 1920 and 2021 based on librarian and teacher polls, top 100 roundups in media like Time magazine and the BBC, book critic reviews, interviews with children’s book authors, and lists of award-winning literature for young readers.
Gallery Credit: Joni Sweet
Largest tax bill increases in New Jersey in 2025
These are the municipalities in New Jersey where the average tax bill increased by at least a thousand dollars in 2025, starting with the lowest. The data is from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs.
Gallery Credit: New Jersey 101.5
