Troy community blocks Trinity Health plan to close Burdett Birth Center

Bipartisan coalition reversed closure nearly a year after announcement

TROY, N.Y. — Trinity Health has abandoned its plan to close the Burdett Birth Center, the last remaining hospital-based birthing center in this Hudson River city, after months of organized opposition that united midwives, mothers, religious leaders, and elected officials from both major parties.

The reversal came nearly a year after Trinity announced the closure of the center at Samaritan Hospital, where babies have been delivered since the city’s once-bustling factories produced most of America’s shirt collars a century ago. Under the original plan, families from Troy and surrounding Rensselaer County would have had to travel up to a half-hour to deliver at another Trinity facility in Albany.

For residents like Starletta Washington, who heads the local YWCA and was herself born at Samaritan, the prospect was unthinkable. “It was devastating,” Washington said. “Blew my mind.” She added: “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?”

Burdett had become a model for patient-focused maternity care in the years before the closure announcement. Midwives and doulas worked alongside OB-GYNs, and the center supported mothers who wanted to avoid cesarean deliveries unless medically necessary. According to 2025 hospital data, only about a quarter of newborns at Burdett were delivered by C-section, compared with about a third statewide. The center also reported fewer preterm births and fewer babies with low birth weights.

Lidia Zambrano-Madera, who gave birth to both her children at Burdett with the help of a midwife, said proximity and quality of care drew her there. “I wouldn’t go anywhere else,” she said.

Trinity Health, a multibillion-dollar system headquartered in Michigan, told the community three years ago that the birth center was losing money and needed to close. Steven Hanks, a physician who oversees Trinity hospitals in New York and New England, said the system had been forced to make hard choices about which services to sustain. “We’ve been frantic about trying not to cut the care at the bedside,” Hanks said. “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.”

The announcement triggered an immediate backlash. Within days, midwives, mothers, community leaders, and politicians held a rally at the YWCA in downtown Troy. Volunteers led by doulas and midwives distributed pink “Save Burdett” signs at the local farmers market. Activists conducted a community survey that found 1 in 4 Troy residents did not have access to a car and would have had difficulty reaching alternative hospitals in Albany.

The campaign drew on long-standing personal ties many residents had to the birth center. “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.

It also tapped into frustration with what residents described as the detachment of large corporate health systems. Trinity Health operates 91 hospitals and last year recorded more than $25 billion in revenue and an operating margin that topped 5%. Hayek said local concerns did not register with executives in the Midwest. “Trinity Health is in the Midwest, and they are not in the community,” she 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.”

Carmella Mantello, Troy’s Republican mayor and a former City Council president, said the experience had crossed partisan lines. “Whether you were Republican or Democrat, or if you didn’t vote, it literally brought everyone together,” Mantello said. “Everyone just said, ‘We can’t let this happen.’” She described the change in hospital care over recent decades as a shift toward a “more corporate type of atmosphere.”

Even the Catholic bishop publicly opposed the closure. Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, who has since retired, said after Trinity announced the plan that closing the birthing center was out of step with the values of his faith and of the Catholic health system. “Nothing is more central to the Catholic healthcare mission than supporting life and all those who bring it into the world,” Scharfenberger said.

Despite the backlash, Trinity executives for months insisted they had no choice, and the system sued the state to push the closure forward. State officials eventually joined the fight against the closure. Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, opened an investigation into the proposed closure and hosted a daylong hearing in Troy.

State Assemblyman 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 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 first announcing the closure, Trinity reversed course 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 what she described as a growing bipartisan suspicion of big 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.”

The Burdett campaign fits a broader pattern. Since 2010, hospitals have closed hundreds of maternity units as cities and towns have shrunk and hospital systems have consolidated into larger networks.

McDonald, the state assemblyman, said he saw a broader lesson in the outcome. “If we take down our swords,” he said, “and put out our arms, maybe we can get something done.”