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According to new statistics from the Association of American Medical Colleges, for the second year in a row, students graduating from U.S. medical schools were less likely to apply this year for residency positions in states with abortion bans and other significant abortion restrictions.
Since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, state fights over abortion access have created plenty of uncertainty for pregnant patients and their doctors. But that uncertainty has also bled into the world of medical education, forcing some new doctors to factor state abortion laws into their decisions about where to begin their careers.
Fourteen states, primarily in the Midwest and South, have banned nearly all abortions. The new analysis by the AAMC — a preliminary copy of which was exclusively reviewed by KFF Health News before its public release — found that the number of applicants to residency programs in states with near-total abortion bans declined by 4.2%, compared with a 0.6% drop in states where abortion remains legal.
Notably, the AAMC’s findings illuminate the broader problems abortion bans can create for a state’s medical community, particularly in an era of provider shortages: The organization tracked a larger decrease in interest in residencies in states with abortion restrictions not only among those in specialties most likely to treat pregnant patients, like OB-GYNs and emergency room doctors, but also among aspiring doctors in other specialties.
Really? This article surprised me. If I were a medical graduate, I’d aim to be employed in a state that banned abortion. I wouldn’t want to be involved in any medical procedure that ended the life of an unborn child, outside of some emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy. I don’t think anyone aspires to become a doctor that gives abortions. I’d make sure to specialize in an areas that didn’t require me to provide that for patients.
It’s not a child, though, it is a fetus. It is a meat bean.
However you slice it, what these laws accomplish is to ratchet up liability for doctors and clinics treating pregnant women. The last thing I’d want is a pro-life doctor treating my mother, given her history of miscarriages. If Texas evangelicals had it their way, my mom would have bleed out on the operating table after her first failed pregnancy, rather than going on to have four more kids.
Yes, they don’t give a shit about actually saving lives. They certainly do fuckall to protect a child after it is born. They want to control women.
Yup. And many of them are spontaneously aborted naturally anyway. Miscarriages are very common.
I don’t really feel like a child should be reduced to being called a meat bean. That’s some possible life saving blood donor growing in there, and it might save your life one day.
It could also be a Repub who wants to force unwilling women into medical slavery as incubators.
I don’t think maybe saving my life is an acceptable reason to force women to be medical equipment. To be clear, I don’t think 100% certainty of saving my life is an acceptable reason either.
It is a meat bean. If someone chooses to incubate it into a child that’s okay too.
This line of reasoning is maddeningly stupid. Guess what, we’re all made of stardust. Don’t be mistreating any matter whatsoever lest you kill a potential life.
Science says it’s a meat bean. You’re just straight up wrong. It’s not a child in every sense of the word
I know that most biologists would call it a fetus. Before that it’s an embryo. Before that, it’s a blastocyst. The funny part is, if a fetus is born early at around 6months (even earlier in some cases) it’s called a premature baby, and can survive outside of the womb with the help of a good NICU. At what point would you stop calling it a “meat bean”?
And why are we talking about the fetus alone as having a future? That woman forced to incubate a fetus might be losing her chance at medical school. She might be the difference between saving my life or not. Women are not just for growing children.
Being raped and carrying a child didn’t stop me from finishing my master’s degree, and one other certification related to my field. I had to work around the morning sickness, dealt with the swollen ankles around evening each day, and the back pain. I think a woman who has an abortion, instead of carrying her baby to full term is in for a lifetime of mental health issues. Then again, every time I try to dna test my children, to prove that a relative raped me, I am threatened with being framed and locked up in either a ward, or jail, to stop me from gathering dna on them. Saliva. That’s all it would take. Two tubes of saliva and sending them to a lab to be tested. All less than $200. I still think my life would be worse without my children, though. I love them. I can’t imagine my life without having had them.
What happened to you is really awful. You made your decision and you love your children. You were resilient enough to finish a Master’s in addition, I’m not certain everyone could or would.
I don’t want it to be up to you or that state to determine the best choices for other people medically, including mentally. It should be between them and their doctors.
You’re not thinking it through at all. Medicine is a messy business, and sometimes it means you have to perform an abortion to save a woman’s life. If you were a doctor, would you want to move to a state where the government is going to second guess every medical decision you make and potentially hold you liable?
Whatever else you think about abortion, you should at least understand that nobody wants to be legally penalized because some politician who has never studied medicine in his life decided that your patient’s life wasn’t sufficiently threatened for you to be able to do your job properly.
That’s because abortions and the procedures used for them are a necessary part of obstetrics care that every obstetrician needs to know to be competent in their field. Doctors don’t want to be in states where they can’t give the care that patients need, being forced to watch as they suffer knowing they could have been able to do something about it if not for the laws. And they especially don’t want to train in states where they won’t get exposure and training in all of their field. Many obgyn programs are now having to scramble and try to do things like add out of state rotations so that their trainees can still get some experience. Doctors especially don’t want to worry about being thrown in jail because ill informed prosecutors and members of the general public decided that a mother wasn’t critically ill enough to get her life saving abortion yet or some other nonsense.
There are more women going into medicine now then men. They understand how critically important access to abortion is, and that they may need one, potentially to protect their health or their ability to have more pregnancies in the future, even if it was a planned pregnancy they had every intention of carrying to term. And men of course have female loved ones they care about and want to have access to proper medical care as well. And every specialty has female patients that they want to have the best care in any eventuality.
Unfortunately abortion opponents have pushed many different fantasies about pregnancy and obstetrics, I think usually out of ignorance. But doctors are well educated on these matters. You’ll continue to see an exodus of trained medical professionals from these states, not just in obgyn but across all of medicine. And I think across all of medicine they see the writing on the wall, that republican states are determined to get more and more invasive in getting between patients and their doctors. I doubt it would stop at just banning abortions and transgender care if Republicans have their way, and people are already suffering across the country because of it.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/23/1177542605/abortion-bans-drive-off-doctors-and-put-other-health-care-at-risk
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/26/us-abortion-ban-providers-doctors-leaving-states
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/06/abortion-maternity-health-obgyn/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/22/abortion-idaho-women-rights-healthcare
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/09/29/abortion-new-doctors-avoid-conservative-states-survey-shows/70980770007/
Guessing you’re religious, older, and watch fox “news”. Believe it or not, the majority of people don’t have your same view.
Actually, I’m in my thirties and never actually took Catechism courses, or had first communion. I don’t watch Fox News. Fox News is just looking to publish anything that grabs attention. I don’t agree with abortion, but I realize everyone is entitled to their own view. My biggest fear for doctors, is the threat of gangs putting hits on their lives for having any involvement in some procedure, like an abortion. I bet they even fear for their lives if they resuscitate a gang member that’s admitted to the ER with gunshot wounds, or stab wounds. I don’t look at my opinion from other stand points, on this one. Doctors need to protect themselves, too.
Then there may be hope for you yet. Have you ever been raped?
We don’t really need to discuss it, but I have dna proof of why a raped woman shouldn’t have an abortion. You know who is blocking that dna proof from being added to my ancestry family tree? Relatives. You don’t need to school me on “rape victims need abortions”. You’re talking to someone who has been raped more than once and believes that waiting nine months provides much necessary evidence to make everyone else in the family tree be silent.
Go fuck yourself with a rusty lawnmower blade.
What in the hell are you talking about? Gang members? Lol. I hope you’re a bot or a troll.
Oh, you don’t know my son’s dad. If I had had an abortion, he probably would have killed everyone who made that possible, and made sure I couldn’t speak about any of it to law enforcement. You don’t think gangs exist? I’d like to know where you live, or what family tree you have. It must be nice not to have a family that shuts down rape victims when they speak out about what happened. I guess you’re just lucky.