…
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.
My sister is overseas and planning to come back stateside in a few years. She wanted to move back to Texas to be close to the rest of the family but says, “I can’t risk living in Texas if I want to have more kids”. My friend’s gyno gave her the hard sell on having her tubes tied recently, because there’s nothing that can be done for her if she gets pregnant. I know a guy who works in a Houston ER, who is getting increasingly weird policies from his administrators when it comes to treating pregnant patients, because nobody wants to risk taking on liability for a miscarriage or still birth.
These are all the “unforeseen” consequences of the new abortion laws. And it certainly doesn’t help that states with shit abortion laws already had 50-300% higher maternal mortality rates and infant mortality rates before these laws were passed.
The so-called pro-life agenda is directly leading to few people having kids and more people losing access to health care.
Pro-Life is going to get a ton of people killed.
We already have a dire shortage of medical practitioners, especially in rural areas. And some of the states with these bans have a lot of rural areas.
Soon we’ll need Doctors Without Borders to start operations within the US.
I thought they already were going to send their ships to the US Gulf coast?
They’d get shot trying to cross.
To be fair, it’s a French organization I believe. So we are an international area they could send aide to
Shocker. Who could have seen this coming?!
Me! I did!
If you had to choose the possibility of a murder charge and capital punishment for following your oath or simply not, why would anyone opt for the former?
Technically, the oath says not to ever perform an abortion.
I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.
Though there may be a loophole, since Hippocrates seems to acknowledge the existence of surgeons (“I will not use the knife, […] but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein” ), and his oath doesn’t seem to apply to them.
Yeah it also says don’t cut for stones (kidney stones), but I don’t see us casting urology out of medicine and letting people die of ureter obstructions. Doctors also don’t generally worship Apollo anymore, to the best of my knowledge.
Turns out standards of care and what is possible or safest have evolved since ancient Greece.
Doctors don’t take the literal original hipppcratic oath. There’s a ton of junk in there no one would want doctors to follow. It’s most common for each medical student class to create their own oath in the spirit of the hipppcratic oath when entering medical school, and then take that, or use a modernized version. And yes, vowing to do no abortions would absolutely conflict with “do no harm” in the modern age, and would lead to the needless suffering and death of pregnant individuals.
🤮
Technically, you can still perform an abortion if you don’t use a pessary to do it.
Pretty sure doctors aren’t taking the literal oath…
I swear by Apollo Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture.
Oh yeah, they don’t! Maybe if you scrolled down to the section that talks about the modern equivalent.
In the 1960s, the Hippocratic Oath was changed to require “utmost respect for human life from its beginning”, making it a more secular obligation, not to be taken in the presence of any gods, but before only other people. When the oath was rewritten in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, the prayer was omitted, and that version has been widely accepted and is still in use today by many US medical schools:[31]
As of 1993, only 14% of medical oaths prohibited euthanasia, and only 8% prohibited abortion.[33]
Be gone heretic, we must follow the old ways.
Retvrn to Leeches
This-- will just get worse: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/health/maternity-units-closing/index.html
“Elections have consequences”
This particular article though- their seventh child? fucking chill.
How long until one of those GOP dipshits tries to pass a law to require that Doctors cannot leave their states?
I doubt it will come to this. Instead what they will do is pass laws so that mid level providers can legally practice like physicians. Just make physicians unnecessary. Hospitals love it because PAs are way cheaper to employ. Everyone wins (except for the patient but we don’t need to think about that).
Have you ever seen a libertarian screeching about how regulations and licensing is the sole determining factor making medical care expensive? I think Repubs will remove medical licensing.
Otherwise banning travel between states is too unconstitutional even at the current corruption level of SCOTUS. Maybe if they can get another couple of Clarences they could do it.
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.
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.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
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.
It’s not a child, though, it is a fetus. It is a meat bean.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
I guess the degens should go fuck themselves with a wad of rubles.
I wish it only harmed degens. This utterly predictable consequence makes medical care even more inaccessible in those states. Mostly for disadvantaged women, many of whom voted against this shit.
Yep. Sad. Repubs have always been about oppressing women.
Its more the reverse.
US anti-abortion hysteria bled into Russian politics over the last decade. A country that had some of the most progressive women’s health care laws in the world has been rolling them back at a rapid clip, thanks to lobbying from western evangelicals and their billionaire white nationalist sponsors.
It feels like Republicans have realized the only way to retake a majority vote is to ensure the maximum number of deaths; aka a culling.
Followed by waiting out a generation of unnecessary/preventable deaths in the working class, and ensure the next generations are even worse uninformed. Leaving few aware of how the world used to be.
Thankfully, a brave select few are driving our species off a cliff. So, our industrial age will be a plastic skid-mark in the underwear of Earth’s fossil record for the next major species to find. /s
Obviously
One guy tweeting “I’m skeptical” isn’t a rebuttal
Would love to read this but it’s account-gated by X so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
