States that criminalize abortion (and hence also care for miscarriages) are losing obstetricians...
The New Yorker has the story:
The Texas Ob-Gyn Exodus. Amid increasingly stringent abortion laws, doctors who provide maternal care have been fleeing the state. By Stephania Taladrid
"Across Texas, reports were surfacing of women being sent home to manage miscarriages on their own. In 2021, the state had passed a law known as S.B. 8, banning nearly all abortions after electrical activity is detected in fetal cells, which typically happens around the sixth week of gestation. The law encouraged civilians to sue violators, in exchange for the possibility of a ten-thousand-dollar reward.
From a medical standpoint, the treatment for abortion and miscarriage was the same—and so, even though miscarriage care remained legal, physicians began putting it off, or denying it outright. After Roe was overturned, the laws in Texas tightened further, so that abortion was banned at any phase of pregnancy, unless the woman was threatened with death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” Violations could send practitioners to prison for life.
...
"the new laws were already having an effect on the health-care system. Across Texas, residency applications in ob-gyn dropped significantly. Data from the Gender Equity Policy Institute revealed a fifty-six-per-cent spike in maternal deaths in the state between 2019 and 2022. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas was no longer an outlier; in the weeks after the ruling, thirteen states moved to ban abortion. By then, Serapio and Salcedo had already left Texas. Another ob-gyn at the practice, Pam Parker, would follow soon.
...
"Kornberg was moving to Los Angeles to finish her residency. Like the doctors who had left before her, Kornberg had come to see herself as “part of the problem,” she said. “I have the knowledge, all the support staff, everything to be able to help this person avoid one of these horrible outcomes—and they’re begging me to do it, but I’m not allowed to.” The bans felt like a personal attack, she said: “The state sees you as a felon.” When the act of caring for pregnant women in Texas could carry the same penalty as murder, the inevitable conclusion for Kornberg was “You don’t want me here? Fine, I’ll leave.”
...
"A report released last month by Manatt Health, a health-care consultancy based in Los Angeles, confirmed Brown’s fears. Manatt surveyed hundreds of ob-gyns in Texas to examine the impact of abortion bans. Seventy-six per cent of respondents said that they could no longer treat patients in accordance with evidence-based medicine. Twenty-one per cent said that they were either considering leaving the state or already planning to do so; thirteen per cent had decided to retire early. The report found “historic and worsening shortages” of ob-gyns, which “disproportionately impact rural and economically disadvantaged communities.” As in the Rio Grande Valley, the bans were shrinking the field’s future workforce: residency programs across Texas have seen a sixteen-per-cent drop in applications.
"Texas is among the twenty-one states where abortion is banned or severely restricted. In Idaho, nearly a quarter of the state’s ob-gyns have left since the ban went into effect, and rural hospitals have stopped providing labor and delivery services. In Louisiana, three-quarters of rural hospitals no longer offer maternity care. "
Posts
