The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade and clearing the way for roughly half the states to ban abortion is forcing the nation’s providers to upend their lives and could radically alter the reproductive health care landscape.
One clinic in Alabama, for example, is offering its roughly dozen staff members buyouts to give them a couple months’ cushion if they need to search for jobs in other states.
An abortion provider near Cleveland — a single mom who promised her teenage son he wouldn’t have to change schools again — is switching fields to become an addiction specialist. And a Texas doctor, who felt his job had become untenable, just packed up to relocate to Montana, where abortion remains legal, for now.
The National Abortion Federation has set up an online marketplace where doctors who have been shut down or expect to be can sell their ultrasound machines, speculums and other equipment.
“We’re all grappling with the question of, ‘At what point would I move?’” said Ashley Brant, an OB-GYN at an academic facility in Northwestern Ohio and a fellow with the nonprofit group Physicians for Reproductive Health. “What will be my personal line in the sand?”
Though the number of abortion providers in the nearly two dozen states that have banned or are expected to swiftly ban abortion is small — about 10 percent of the national total, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights think tank — their departure will likely have an outsized impact.
Health experts warn that this potential migration could be devastating for patients, leaving them without access to birth control, prenatal care and other reproductive health services. They also fear no provider will be left in some communities to perform emergency abortions in the life-threatening circumstances exempt from most state bans.
“If you see a fleeing of providers from states that have severely restricted their ability to practice in line with their moral compass and medical ethics, it will be a huge loss to public and community health,” said Jamila Perritt, an abortion provider in Washington, D.C., and the president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health. “We don’t have to guess what’s going to happen. We already see the high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity in places like Louisiana and Mississippi. But we’ll see much more of that as these bans continue to sweep the country.”
Among the providers POLITICO spoke with in states with abortion bans on their books, none said they are willing to offer illegal abortions — aware that doing so risks losing their medical license and, in some states, serving a lengthy jail sentence.
Instead, many are planning to travel across state lines a few days a week or month to provide abortions while keeping a practice in their home state in case the bans are reversed. Some intend to use telemedicine to consult with their patients and prescribe abortion pills in states that allow them. And others — especially those whose current work focuses mainly on abortion …read more