Idaho abortion ban opponents protest at the state Capitol in January 2023.Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman/ZUMA
Two months after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, in June 2022, Idaho’s trigger ban outlawing most abortions—one of the strictest nationwide—took effect.
The fallout soon made headlines. The Biden-era Department of Justice sued, 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—including by providing abortions when necessary. (That kicked off a legal battle that made it to the Supreme Court last year, which avoided deciding the case on its merits.) And within months of the state ban taking effect, a maternity ward in rural northern Idaho closed, citing the state’s “legal and political climate.”
“When those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that [walks] out of that state. It’s a big dang deal.”
As all this was happening, another shift was quietly unfolding across the state: obstetricians (OBs) in Idaho—doctors who specialize in delivering babies and providing care for pregnant people during and after pregnancy—were 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 reports of these departures, there has been limited data quantifying how many OBs the state lost after Roe was overruled—until now.
According to a new peer-reviewed paper published in JAMA Network Open last week, Idaho lost more than a third of its OBs—94 of 268 total—between August 2022 and December 2024. That figure combines the 114 who left their jobs and 20 OBs who moved to Idaho during the study period. It includes physicians who left the state—the most common outcome, accounting for about half of the total departures, according to J. Edward McEachern, the paper’s lead author—as 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’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Abortion bans create ripple effects that harm other forms of health care.
“When those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that walk out of that state,” said McEachern, who is also a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Boise State University and the chief medical officer at St. Luke’s Health Plan. “It’s a big dang deal,” he added.
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 that the findings are “a clear example of the damage abortion bans cause beyond abortion access.” Candace Gibson, director of state policy at the reproductive rights advocacy and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute, agreed, saying the data “shows how abortion bans destabilize the entire reproductive health system.” Other research has also illustrated this: A 2023 survey of more than 500 OB/GYNs conducted by KFF, for example, found that 68 percent of respondents said the Dobbs decision negatively impacted their ability to manage pregnancy-related emergencies. Reporting from ProPublica has also shown that sepsis and maternal deaths surged in Texas following both Dobbs and the state’s six-week abortion ban, which was implemented in 2021.
To come up with their calculations, McEachern and three other researchers initially consulted a federal database of health care providers to find a list of licensed OBs in Idaho; then, they consulted another set of sources—including databases maintained by ACOG and the Idaho Medical Association, physicians’ and hospitals’ websites, and the actual physicians themselves—to 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’s 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 in 2023 that more than half of the 240 health care providers surveyed they were considering or definitely leaving the state within the year in light of the new abortion ban.
I found a similar trend in my own reporting, when I covered 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’s ban contributed to their decisions to move. “Thinking about what our community has lost—that is gutting,” one of those doctors, Amelia Huntsberger, previously told me; Huntsberger relocated to Oregon that year.
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 from March of Dimes. McEachern’s study signals this is only getting worse: It found that 85 percent of the state’s remaining OBs are concentrated in Idaho’s seven most populous counties. That leaves 23 OBs to serve more than 560,000 people in the remaining 37 counties—or, as McEachern puts it, “a very brittle and fragile system.”
“If one person gets hurt or retires or moves on,” he said, “it creates a system that is unsustainable.”
None of the obstetricians tracked moved to states with abortion bans.
Experts say the new data reveals the urgent need to bolster the state’s health care landscape. Connolly, from ACOG, said, “when a state’s OB/GYN workforce is already struggling to meet the volume of patient needs, like Idaho’s, each loss means more people who have to travel long distances for basic health care—or go without it altogether.”
Dr. Megan Kasper, an OB/GYN and president-elect of the Idaho Medical Association, called for “common sense changes to our law to ensure Idahoans have access to maternal health care now and in the future” in response to the study. While Idaho lawmakers have largely resisted calls to amend the state’s abortion laws, advocates have continued pushing for change, including by seeking to gather enough signatures to put an abortion rights ballot measure before voters next year.
McEachern and the other researchers, for their part, plan to continue tracking the losses of Idaho’s 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.
As McEachern put it, “We want this place to be better.”