TROY, N.Y. — Like many residents of this aging industrial city on the Hudson River, Starletta Washington was stunned when she heard Troy’s last remaining hospital planned to close its birthing center.
“It was devastating,” said Washington, who heads the local YWCA. Washington was born at the hospital and had her children there. She couldn’t believe families would now have to get to a hospital half an hour away or face the prospect of an emergency delivery.
“Nobody else was going to be born in the city of Troy unless they were born on a city bus, in the back of a cab, or, disgustingly, on the side of the street?” Washington said. “Blew my mind.”
Troy wasn’t the first community to face this prospect. Since 2010, hospitals have closed hundreds of maternity units as cities and towns shrink and hospitals consolidate into larger systems.
Troy found a more hopeful ending.
Elected officials from both major parties joined patient advocates, mothers, midwives, doulas, and community leaders like Washington to challenge Trinity Health, the large Catholic health system that owns Troy’s hospital and birthing center. The campaign even united Planned Parenthood and the Catholic diocese.
“Whether you were Republican or Democrat, or if you didn’t vote, it literally brought everyone together,” said Carmella Mantello, the city’s Republican mayor. “Everyone just said, ‘We can’t let this happen.’”
Throughout the country, healthcare remains a flash point as politicians square off ahead of November’s elections. But in many places, Americans are also quietly finding common ground.
In this small city, residents were brought together by frustration over large, corporate health systems that can seem to put profits over patients. And they resolved to work together to keep critical medical services in their community.
A Community Institution
Babies have been delivered at Samaritan Hospital on a hill above Troy since this city’s once bustling factories produced most of America’s shirt collars a century ago.
More recently, Samaritan’s Burdett Birth Center had become a model for patient-focused care. Midwives and doulas work alongside OB-GYNs and support mothers who want to avoid a delivery by cesarean section unless necessary.
Patient safety advocates have pushed for years to reduce surgical deliveries, which can lead to complications. At Burdett, only about a quarter of newborns are delivered by C-section, compared with about a third statewide, according to 2025 hospital data. Burdett also had fewer preterm births and fewer babies with low birth weights.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere else,” said Lidia Zambrano-Madera, who gave birth to both her children at Burdett with the help of a midwife.
For Zambrano-Madera, who recently opened a children’s play center in Troy, Burdett offered another advantage: It was just five minutes from home.
But three years ago, Trinity Health, a multibillion-dollar Michigan-based hospital system, said the birth center was losing money and would close. Families from Troy and surrounding Rensselaer County would have to deliver at another Trinity hospital in Albany, up to a half-hour’s drive away. The hospitals are branded under St. Peter’s Health Partners in the Albany region.
“We’ve been frantic about trying not to cut the care at the bedside,” said Steven Hanks, a physician who oversees Trinity hospitals in New York and New England. “But, you know, you get to a point where you can only consolidate so much. You can only spread people so thin, and then you have to start taking harder looks at your actual services.”
Corporate Backlash
Trinity’s plans — news of which broke in a local newspaper — came without warning, surprising the obstetrical staff and community leaders. They set off a firestorm.
Within days, midwives, mothers, community leaders, and politicians held a rally at the YWCA in downtown Troy. Others would follow. Volunteers led by doulas and midwives made T-shirts and handed out pink “Save Burdett” signs at the local farmers market.
Activists were outraged that the hospital hadn’t adequately assessed the impact of the closure, particularly on low-income families. They conducted a community survey that found 1 in 4 Troy residents didn’t have access to a car and would have trouble getting to Albany.
The campaign drew on deep connections that many residents had to Burdett. “They realized what a gem Burdett is, and what a great community service they provide,” said Jessica Hayek, a doula and birth educator who helped lead the campaign.
Hayek and others also tapped into deep-seated frustration with Trinity, a healthcare behemoth that operates 91 hospitals and last year recorded more than $25 billion in revenue and a healthy operating margin that topped 5%.
“Trinity Health is in the Midwest, and they are not in the community,” Hayek said. “So when you’re looking at just the numbers from an office in the Midwest somewhere, they’re not looking at the benefit that this place has on the community.”
Hayek describes herself as a liberal Democrat. But Trinity’s focus on its bottom line also irked many Republicans, including Mantello, who was the City Council president at the time.
“The whole hospital scene has changed,” Mantello said. “It was very personable. You had nurses and doctors who were able to give more care and spend more time with patients.” Now, by contrast, many hospitals have what she described as a “more corporate type of atmosphere.”
Even the Catholic bishop decried the planned closure of the birthing center as out of step with the values of his faith and the hospital system’s.
“Nothing is more central to the Catholic healthcare mission than supporting life and all those who bring it into the world,” Bishop Edward Scharfenberger said after Trinity announced the closure plan. Scharfenberger has since retired.
A Bipartisan Solution
Despite the backlash, Trinity Health executives for months insisted they had no choice. The system even sued the state to push through the closure.
Ultimately, though, powerful state officials, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, joined the fight to save the birthing center, launching an investigation into the proposed closure and hosting a daylong hearing in Troy.
State Assembly member John T. McDonald III, a Democrat who represents Troy, worked with Republican elected officials, including the county executive and the state senator representing Troy, to secure $5 million in state funding to help keep Burdett open.
“You had a Democrat and a bunch of Republicans all working together on the same issue,” McDonald said, “because, at the end of the day, our job is to listen to what the public has to say.”
Nearly a year after announcing the closure, Trinity reversed itself and said Burdett would remain open.
Lois Uttley, a New York City-based researcher and activist who has worked with communities facing hospital consolidation, said Troy’s success reflects a growing bipartisan suspicion of corporate healthcare organizations.
“The executives of these health systems will tell the community that joining a big health system will be good, that the quality of care will improve, that efficiencies will mean they can keep the costs low,” Uttley said. “But what I have seen over the last 30 years of work is that those promises often are broken.”
As hospitals close or downsize, she said, communities are catching on. “They’re becoming more skeptical.”
There’s another, more hopeful lesson in Troy’s success, said McDonald, the state lawmaker.
“If we take down our swords,” he said, “and put out our arms, maybe we can get something done.”
Facts Only
* Starletta Washington, who heads the local YWCA, was stunned by plans to close a hospital birthing center.
* Hospitals have closed hundreds of maternity units since 2010 due to consolidation.
* Elected officials from both major parties joined patient advocates and community leaders to challenge Trinity Health.
* The campaign united Planned Parenthood and the Catholic diocese.
* Samaritan Hospital’s Burdett Birth Center previously featured midwife support.
* Patient safety advocates pushed for reduced surgical deliveries; Burdett had a C-section rate of about a quarter, compared to a third statewide in 2025 data.
* Trinity Health planned to close the birthing center, requiring deliveries to move to Trinity hospitals in Albany.
* Activists conducted a community survey finding one in four Troy residents lacked car access.
* Powerful state officials, including Attorney General Letitia James, joined the fight.
* State Assembly member John T. McDonald III secured $5 million in state funding to keep Burdett open.
* Trinity Health reversed its decision and stated that Burdett would remain open.
Executive Summary
Residents of Troy, New York, mobilized to challenge the plan to close a hospital birthing center owned by Trinity Health. Residents expressed concern about access to essential healthcare services if the facility closed, noting that families would face a half-hour drive to an alternative hospital in Albany. Community leaders, patient advocates, mothers, midwives, doulas, and community figures joined elected officials from both major parties in opposing the closure. The campaign successfully united diverse groups, including Planned Parenthood and the Catholic diocese, focusing on concerns about corporate control over patient care and access.
The context involves a broader trend where hospitals have closed maternity units over the last decade due to consolidation into larger health systems. The local effort highlighted a focus on patient-centered care at Samaritan Hospital’s Burdett Birth Center, which previously featured midwife support and aimed to reduce C-section rates for safer deliveries. Despite internal corporate push for closure, public and political pressure resulted in Trinity Health reversing its decision, ensuring the facility remains open.
Full Take
The narrative illustrates the tension between corporate financial imperatives and community-centric values within healthcare systems. The event highlights how large, geographically distant health conglomerates can prioritize systemic efficiencies over localized patient needs, creating a tangible threat to community infrastructure when public accountability is absent. The mobilization demonstrates that frustration over perceived profit-over-patient priorities can bridge political divides, suggesting that shared skepticism toward corporate entities acts as a catalyst for collective action across ideological lines.
The pattern observed is the conflict between centralized administrative logic (cost containment) and localized lived experience (access to care). The successful outcome—reversing the closure through bipartisan intervention and state involvement—suggests that when systemic inertia clashes with visible community harm, external accountability mechanisms can force a re-evaluation. This process underscores a crucial dynamic in modern public life: the emergence of skepticism toward large institutions regarding their stated goals versus their actual impacts on specific populations. The lesson lies in recognizing how fragmented or centralized power structures can be leveraged to dictate outcomes unless countervailing social and political forces are mobilized effectively against them.
Bridge questions: How can public policy frameworks better incentivize health systems to integrate community benefits directly into operational metrics rather than treating community needs as externalities? What are the long-term effects on patient trust when legislative action is required to reverse corporate decisions? If bipartisan coalition building is effective here, what systemic institutional changes are needed to ensure similar unity in future healthcare crises?
Sentinel — Human
The text reads like high-quality local investigative journalism that successfully synthesizes community advocacy with institutional conflict, relying heavily on personal testimony to establish emotional weight.