Idaho abortion ban opponents protest at the state Capitol in January 2023.<\/span>Sarah A. Miller\/Idaho Statesman\/ZUMA<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Two months after<\/span> the Supreme Court overruled<\/a> Roe v. Wade<\/em>, in June 2022, Idaho\u2019s trigger ban outlawing<\/a> most abortions\u2014one of the strictest nationwide\u2014took effect.<\/p>\n The fallout soon made headlines. The Biden-era Department of Justice sued<\/a>, alleging that the Idaho ban violated a federal law that required hospitals to stabilize people who arrived in their emergency rooms facing threats to their life or health\u2014including by providing abortions when necessary. (That kicked off a legal battle that made it to the Supreme Court last year, which avoided<\/a> deciding the case on its merits.) And within months of the state ban taking effect, a maternity ward in rural northern Idaho closed<\/a>, citing the state\u2019s \u201clegal and political climate.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that [walks] out of that state. It\u2019s a big dang deal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n As all this was happening, another shift was quietly unfolding across the state: obstetricians<\/a> (OBs) in Idaho\u2014doctors who specialize in delivering babies and providing <\/strong>care for pregnant people during and after pregnancy\u2014were leaving their jobs as they faced the threat of jail time, fines, and felony charges for providing abortions, even in the case of life-threatening emergencies. While there have been some<\/a> reports<\/a> of these departures, there has been limited data quantifying how many OBs the state lost after Roe<\/em> was overruled\u2014until now.<\/p>\n According to a new peer-reviewed paper published<\/a> in JAMA<\/em> Network Open<\/em> last week, Idaho lost more than a third of its OBs\u201494 of 268 total\u2014between August 2022 and December 2024. That figure combines the 114 who left their jobs and 20 OBs who moved to<\/em> Idaho during the study period. It includes physicians who left the state\u2014the most common outcome, accounting for about half of the total departures, according to J. Edward McEachern, the paper\u2019s lead author\u2014as well as those who stopped practicing obstetrics, closed their in-state practices, or retired. The new research supports the hypothesis that experts and abortion rights advocates floated after the Supreme Court\u2019s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization<\/em>: Abortion bans create ripple effects that harm other forms of health care<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that walk out of that state,\u201d said McEachern, who is also a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Boise State University and the chief medical officer at St. Luke\u2019s Health Plan. \u201cIt\u2019s a big dang deal,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n AnnaMarie Connolly, a physician and the chief of education, workforce, and well-being at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), told Mother Jones\u00a0<\/em>that the findings are \u201ca clear example of the damage abortion bans cause beyond abortion access.\u201d Candace Gibson, director of state policy at the reproductive rights advocacy and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute, agreed, saying the data \u201cshows how abortion bans destabilize the entire reproductive health system.\u201d Other research has also illustrated this: A 2023 survey of<\/a> more than 500 OB\/GYNs conducted by KFF, for example, found that 68 percent of respondents said the Dobbs<\/em> decision negatively impacted their ability to manage pregnancy-related emergencies. Reporting<\/a> from ProPublica<\/em> has also shown<\/a> that sepsis and maternal<\/a> deaths<\/a> surged in Texas <\/strong>following both Dobbs<\/em> and the state\u2019s six-week abortion ban, which was implemented in 2021.<\/p>\n To come up with their calculations, McEachern and three other researchers initially consulted<\/a> a federal database of health care providers to find a list of licensed OBs in Idaho; then, they consulted another set of sources\u2014including databases maintained by ACOG and the Idaho Medical Association, physicians\u2019 and hospitals\u2019 websites, and the actual physicians themselves\u2014to verify both the amount of physicians practicing obstetrics in the state and those who had stopped doing so or left Idaho. While the new study did not try to establish causality by asking the physicians if the state\u2019s abortion ban played a role in their decision to stop practicing obstetrics in the state or overall, McEachern points out that none of the OBs who researchers tracked moved to states with abortion bans. The Idaho Coalition for Safe Reproductive Health Care also found<\/a> in 2023 that more than half of the 240 health care providers surveyed said they were considering or definitely leaving the state within the year in light of the new abortion ban.<\/p>\n I found a similar trend in my own reporting, when I covered<\/a> the fallout of the hospital in rural northern Idaho, Bonner General Health, that discontinued its obstetrics care in 2023; the four OBGYNs who previously worked at the hospital all moved to states where abortion is legal, and they all told me Idaho\u2019s ban contributed to their decisions to move. <\/strong>\u201cThinking about what our community has lost\u2014that is gutting,\u201d one of those doctors, Amelia Huntsberger, previously told<\/a> me; Huntsberger relocated to Oregon that year.<\/p>\n This exodus contributes to maternity care deserts, defined as areas that lack access to maternity care providers, which account for about 33 percent of counties nationwide. In Idaho, nearly 30 percent of counties are maternity care deserts, and nearly 20 percent of women have no birthing hospital within a 30 minute drive, according to the most recent data<\/a> from March of Dimes. McEachern\u2019s study signals this is only getting worse: It found that 85 percent of the state\u2019s remaining OBs are concentrated in Idaho\u2019s seven most populous counties. That leaves 23 OBs to serve more than 560,000 people in the remaining 37 counties\u2014or, as McEachern puts it, \u201ca very brittle and fragile system.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf one person gets hurt or retires or moves on,\u201d he said, \u201cit creates a system that is unsustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n None of the obstetricians tracked moved to states with abortion bans.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Experts say the new data reveals the urgent need to bolster the state\u2019s health care landscape. Connolly, from ACOG, said, \u201cwhen a state\u2019s OB\/GYN workforce is already struggling to meet the volume of patient needs, like Idaho\u2019s, each loss means more people who have to travel long distances for basic health care\u2014or go without it altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Megan Kasper, an OB\/GYN and president-elect of the Idaho Medical Association, called for<\/a> \u201ccommon sense changes to our law to ensure Idahoans have access to maternal health care now and in the future\u201d in response to the study. While Idaho lawmakers have largely resisted<\/a> calls to amend the state\u2019s abortion laws, advocates have continued pushing for change, including by seeking<\/a> to gather enough signatures to put an abortion rights ballot measure before voters next year.<\/p>\n McEachern and the other researchers, for their part, plan to continue tracking the losses of Idaho\u2019s obstetricians. They also have several other related research projects planned, including one focused on the amount of time people have to drive to reach obstetrics care in Idaho, with the hope that collecting more reliable data will help improve health care access across the state.<\/p>\n As McEachern put it, \u201cWe want this place to be better.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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