MERCY MEDICAL CENTER in Springfield announced last week that it plans to temporarily halt maternity and newborn services at its Family Life Center starting December 8, sparking fears the hospital will be next in a decade-long trend of statewide maternity unit closures in a region where labor and delivery options have already dwindled.

The Catholic hospital owned by Trinity Health of New England cited persistent staffing constraints as the reason for the suspension. Providers will continue to offer prenatal and postnatal care at outpatient sites throughout Western Massachusetts, according to a press release, but babies will not be delivered at the hospital. The medical center reached an agreement with nearby Baystate Medical Center in Springfield to handle many of Mercy’s maternity patients.

Mercy Medical Center spokesperson Mary Orr did not give an estimated timeline for how long delivery services may be suspended, but a statement from the hospital said it “will continue to pursue all options to resume continuous, safe, high-quality maternity care.”

But Alan Sager, a Boston University School of Public Health professor, said there is reason to sound the alarm.

“This is not pretty,” Sager said. “You lose the doctors who retire and relocate when the hospital closes or when the service shuts down, and then it’s very hard to attract doctors or nurses back into an underserved area.”

Nearly 77 percent of Mercy’s patient revenue came from Medicaid and Medicare as of 2023, and “Medicaid is not a generous payer,” Sager noted.

Since 2014, 11 hospitals in Massachusetts have closed or filed to close their maternity units, according to Health Policy Commission data. Holyoke Medical Center just north of Springfield permanently closed its maternity services unit in 2020 a few months after temporarily shuttering it, later citing the unit’s persistent annual financial losses as the reason for the closure. Many patients from Holyoke have since sought care at Mercy.

“Given Mercy’s location in Springfield serving a fairly heavy mix of Latino patients … the closing of Mercy’s maternity care can dislocate patients who may find it hard to obtain care they’re equally comfortable with elsewhere,” Sager said. “Language-related differences matter to patients. They’re disadvantaged by the successive displacements of care.”

The Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) has argued that the Department of Public Health should be acting more aggressively by treating the suspension like an essential service closure, which provides a mechanism for DPH to review a proposed closure or reduction in services. DPH did not respond to a request for comment.

Jaime Hyatt, a registered nurse serving as co-chair of the MNA bargaining committee at Mercy where he has worked for nearly 25 years, says the staffing issues did not arise overnight.

“Nurses have witnessed deliberate inaction on Trinity Health’s part to backfill vacant positions – especially on the provider side – as evidenced by job postings offering below-market wages,” Hyatt and bargaining co-chair Dee Doyle said in a statement. “This failure to adequately recruit and retain staff has led directly to the erosion of care we see today.”

Mercy declined to answer questions about the maternity unit’s staffing levels and its efforts to recruit and retain employees.

Just over 800 babies were delivered at Mercy in 2022, according to most recent DPH data. Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton and Baystate in Springfield are the two nearest remaining options for patients from Holyoke, Springfield, Chicopee, Westfield, and other surrounding towns. Sager said hospitals are not “interchangeable parts,” and shuttering a service “rips apart the fabric of care” where patients once felt comfortable.

“Springfield is the third largest city in the Commonwealth. How is it possible that there’s no choice of care?” Hyatt said. “It does not seem like the choice should be one hospital in Springfield.”

The financial stability of Mercy Medical Center came into question this summer after reports surfaced that Baystate Health was in talks to acquire the hospital, which Hyatt and Doyle say left staff feeling “vulnerable and compelled to seek employment elsewhere.” In April, the Boston Globe reported on Mercy’s “exodus” of emergency room doctors and its hiring of a private, for-profit medical staffing agency that led to staff departures and pay cuts. In 2024, the hospital lost nearly $30 million and had the lowest profit margin among all independent health systems and hospitals in the state at –9.2 percent.

Hyatt said he is worried the hospital will soon begin seeing births in its emergency department.

“If they are far enough along, there’s not going to be time to send them down the street to Baystate,” he said.

Pulling back services even temporarily in a region with already-limited options for maternal health care has nurses and providers like Hyatt concerned that Western Massachusetts could later become a maternity desert.

“By letting this close, it shows that we are in contraction as opposed to expansion,” he said.