Sanders Announces the October Face of Arkansas

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders today announced the eleventh installment of Faces of Arkansas, a monthly series highlighting Arkansans whose portraits and stories are displayed at the entrance to the Governor’s office as a reminder of who the Governor and her team serve every day: the people of Arkansas. The series was launched to keep the focus of public service rooted in the individuals and communities that make the state what it is.

Each month, a different Arkansan is featured through a written profile, portrait photography, and a short video, with their framed photo hanging inside the Capitol. Selections are based on individuals who make Arkansas function — whether by serving as the heartbeat of their local communities, overcoming obstacles to achieve their dreams, or playing an essential role in their industry. 

This installment features Becky Kay, a labor and delivery nurse in Little Rock for nearly five decades, helping moms and dads welcome their babies into their hearts and homes.

Becky Kay – Miracle of Life

At 18, Becky Kay stood in line at the University of Arkansas at Monticello with a course catalog in her hands and a decision to make. She had gone to college to play basketball. She thought she might become a teacher. But when it came time to register for classes, she was told she needed to choose a major. So, she opened the catalog. “I flipped it open, and there was a two-year associate program in nursing,” Becky remembers. “I said, ‘Oh, I’ll do nursing.’”

There was no lifelong dream of becoming a nurse. In fact, Becky had never even known one. She had barely spent time inside a hospital. But 48 years later, she is still certain she ended up exactly where she was supposed to be. “That was God shoving me in the right direction,” she says.

Becky became a nurse at 20 years old. Early in her career, she worked in an area of the hospital where she frequently lost patients. The work weighed on her. Then she found labor and delivery. It was fast, demanding, and things could change in minutes. But it was also a place where, most of the time, people were excited to walk through the doors. She immediately knew she had found her calling.

“I loved my job when I worked in labor and delivery because people loved coming to the hospital when they were having a baby,” Becky says. “Families are with them, and they’re excited. And I get to participate in every delivery, watching a miracle.”

For nearly five decades, Becky had a front-row seat to some of the biggest moments in Arkansas families’ lives. She watched nervous first-time parents become moms and dads. She watched fathers cry when they met their children. She watched grandparents crowd into rooms to welcome the newest member of the family. And she watched women discover just how strong they were. “They’re saying the whole time, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this,’ but they do,” Becky says. “You get to see women empowered by what their bodies can do.”

After thousands of deliveries, it never became routine. “The birth of a healthy baby is truly a miracle every time,” she says. “It never gets old.” One of Becky’s most memorable deliveries began with a mother who was critically ill and a baby doctors believed had already died. Multiple ultrasounds had confirmed what everyone in the room expected when the mother was taken into surgery. Then the baby was delivered, the cord was clamped, and there was a heartbeat. The baby survived and eventually went home. Becky still calls it her “miracle baby.”

But labor and delivery wasn’t always joyful. Becky spent decades working long shifts where circumstances could change in an instant. Emergencies required nurses to move quickly, work together, and remain calm enough to keep their patients calm, too. That work also gave Becky a close look at one of Arkansas’ biggest health care challenges: distance.

For mothers in rural communities, specialized maternal care can be miles away. Becky cared for high-risk patients transported from communities across Arkansas, and at times she went to them. She still remembers flying by helicopter to Fordyce years ago to help a patient. At the time, there was no hospital helipad. So, the helicopter landed on the 50-yard line of the local football field. An ambulance drove across the field, picked up the medical team, and carried them the remaining distance to the hospital. The story was a reality she saw many times throughout her career: rural health care providers doing everything they could with the resources they had, while nurses and medical teams worked across communities to get mothers the care they needed. Decades later, expanding that access remains one of Arkansas’ biggest health care priorities.

In 2024, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders created the Arkansas Strategic Committee for Maternal Health, bringing together health care providers, state leaders and stakeholders to identify ways to improve care for pregnant women, new mothers and babies. Those recommendations helped shape the Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies Act, signed into law the following year to connect women with care earlier and expand access to maternal health services across the state.

Arkansas is now building on that work through the Rural Health Transformation Program, with more than $1 billion in anticipated investment over five years to strengthen health care in rural communities. The first round alone awarded nearly $150 million to 50 projects focused on expanding telehealth, emergency response, specialty care, and health care access closer to home. Some of those investments are aimed directly at the challenges Becky saw throughout her career.

Arkansas Pregnancy Care Connect will deploy mobile clinic teams to rural communities and establish a statewide nurse-led advice line for pregnant and postpartum women. Another initiative will train family medicine physicians in obstetrical care, helping build a pipeline of doctors equipped to care for mothers before, during, and after delivery in rural Arkansas.

Other Rural Health Transformation investments are expanding telehealth, remote patient monitoring and the rural health care workforce — using new technology and stronger local networks to bring care closer to patients instead of requiring patients to travel hours to find it.

For Becky, technology and medicine have changed almost beyond recognition since her first days as a nurse. When she began, ultrasounds were new and rudimentary. Medical records were kept on paper. Decades later, nurses can watch detailed images of a baby before birth, access records electronically, and connect patients with specialists who may be miles away. But the most important part of the job, she says, has not changed at all. “Nothing takes the place of touching the patient and making eye contact,” Becky says. “A patient knows how you make them feel.”

That belief guided the way she cared for mothers: talk to them, reassure them, answer their questions, and make sure they understood they were capable of what came next. “Nursing, you do it for the love of people and the compassion,” she says. “You make such a huge difference in their everyday life.”

Today, Becky volunteers with women rebuilding their lives after domestic abuse and addiction, an opportunity that carries personal meaning for her after receiving help during a difficult period in her own life years ago. She also continues teaching CPR and infant-safety classes, preparing parents and grandparents for everything from a choking emergency to basic safety at home. The goal is the same one she carried into labor and delivery rooms for decades: send people away a little more confident than they arrived.

Becky’s influence has reached her own family, too. Two of her three daughters became nurses, and another married one. She now has 16 grandchildren. After 48 years in nursing, she has seen medicine transform, families grow, and generations of Arkansans enter the world. Yet when Becky learned she had been nominated as a Face of Arkansas, her first reaction was disbelief. “I was shocked and honored,” she says. “I’m nobody special.”

A doctor who once worked alongside Becky remembered it differently. She remembered Becky as the nurse who welcomed her, showed her the ropes, and could always be counted on to get things done. Becky barely remembered doing it. That may be the best explanation of her nearly five decades of service. What felt ordinary to her mattered to someone else.

For Becky, the spirit of Arkansas is found in people willing to do exactly that: work hard, treat others with respect, and go the extra mile when someone needs help. It’s what she tried to give every mother who entered her care, what she now gives the women and families she serves as a volunteer, and what she hopes to pass down to her children and grandchildren. Forty-eight years later, Arkansas is better for it.

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