Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there has been a significant decline in applications to medical residency programs in states that enacted new abortion restrictions, according to a new study led by Anisha Ganguly, assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Ganguly and her co-authors from the University of Washington and the University of Arizona analyzed residency application data to 4,315 residency programs, encompassing over 24 million complete applications from 2019 to 2023. After the Dobbs ruling in 2022, there was a notable decrease in residency applications in abortion-restricted states compared with non-restricted states among both men and women applicants. The largest declines were found in abortion-related specialities, including obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, internal medicine, and emergency medicine.
“One of the messages that we are getting from this paper is this is an ‘all of us’ problem,” Dr. Ganguly told University of Washington News. “It’s not just about women physicians. It’s about men who are also making choices about their professional autonomy and also about access to reproductive health care for their families. Women have been and will be considering their personal access to care and autonomy before this decision, but perhaps these state restrictions after Dobbs may have newly increased awareness among men.”
Dr. Gangly earned her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and her master of public health degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center. She completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Washington.