• Posted March 13, 2025

OB/GYNs Walk Away From Anti-Abortion States

A brain drain is underway in states that banned or severely restricted abortion after the fall of Roe v Wade, a new study suggests.

A significant decline in the number of practicing obstetricians/gynecologists has occurred in the 12 most restrictive states, according to findings published March 10 in JAMA Network Open.

“Health care providers are like any other group — they can vote with their feet — and the fact that they are leaving the states in which clinical autonomy and decision-making is constrained is very worrisome,” lead researcher Dr. Jane Zhu, an associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, told the health care news service Healio.

“These shifts have enormous ramifications for care access and quality,” Zhu added.

For the study, researchers used a federal practitioner database to track the number of OB/GYNs operating throughout the United States.

They compared the number of those specialists to state-level abortion policy data collected using a legislation tracker maintained by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit sexual and reproductive rights advocacy group.

Researchers specifically focused on 12 states that restricted abortion most following the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022 -- Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

The percentage of OB/GYNs practicing in those states was compared to those in states with abortion restrictions that did not change following Dobbs -- Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Results showed a more than 4% decrease in the percentage of OB/GYNs for every 100,000 women of reproductive age, researchers said.

Doctors likely are choosing to work elsewhere, because they don’t want to face potential legal ramifications for pregnancy care that might require an abortion to protect women’s health or lives, experts said.

It’s "both unfortunate and predictable that OB/GYNs might choose to practice in states where they are allowed to care for women in the way that makes the most medical sense for the woman's health,” Dr. Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, chair of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California-San Diego, told MedPage Today.

"If more OB/GYN providers leave these areas, there will be a direct negative effect on women's health," added Gyamfi-Bannerman, who was not involved in the study.

More information

The Guttmacher Institute has more on state-by-state abortion policies in the U.S.

SOURCES: JAMA Network Open, news release, March 10, 2025; Healio, March 10, 2025; MedPage Today, March 10, 2025