Anisha Ganguly, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of General Medicine & Clinical Epidemiology, co-authored a study revealing a significant disparity in residency program applications in states with more restrictive abortion laws.
Published in JAMA, the research analyzed nearly 24.2 million applications submitted to 4,315 residency programs across all medical specialties between the 2018–2019 and 2022–2023 application cycles, comparing patterns before and after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling. Programs in abortion-restricted states saw statistically significant declines in applications from both women and men compared to programs in states without new restrictions. The gap translated to an estimated 7,833 fewer applications from women and nearly 12,800 fewer applications from men to programs in restricted states.
The declines were most pronounced in abortion-related specialties, obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, internal medicine, and emergency medicine, where the drop in application rates was roughly three times larger than the overall average for both men and women.
“A lot of our perceptions about the impacts of the Dobbs decision on the healthcare workforce have focused on the impacts on women’s health,” Ganguly told MedPage Today. “But if we broaden our perspective … it’s a bigger problem than we may have previously appreciated,” she said.
Because more than half of physicians ultimately practice in the state where they completed their residency training, a sustained decline in applications to programs in abortion-restricted states could worsen existing shortages in primary care and emergency medicine in those regions for years to come, the authors noted.