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FACT CHECK: Did OB/GYNs leave Idaho over pro-life laws? Not likely.
A 2025 study published in the Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) is being used by abortion supporters to claim that obstetrician/gynecologists (OB/GYNs) fled the state after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. But is it true?
Abortion advocates are touting a highly contested 2025 study published in JAMA — insinuating that OB/GYNs fled Idaho after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade — to bolster their claim that Idaho's abortion law should be changed. But the best available evidence refutes the claim that Idaho’s pro-life protections have reduced the amount of women’s healthcare in the state.
Additional published JAMA research of significant cohort size contradicts the other JAMA study's claims, showing that "the number of OBGYNs did not significantly change across policy environments" after Dobbs, and even increased by more than 8% in states (like Idaho) where abortion is banned.
Other research shows that the number of Idaho's women's health practitioners (obstetricians, gynecologists, and midwives) is comparable to or better than that of multiple other states (including those that do not protect preborn children from abortion, like Virginia).
The latest available federal provider data, from September 2025, put Idaho at 47.7 women's health practitioners per 100,000 women — extremely close to the national rate of 48.1 — and at the state's highest women's health provider rate of the previous six years.
Is the availability of OB/GYN care a major issue in Idaho, beyond what's likewise occurring in other states? The answer appears to be no.
America’s Health Rankings, which uses federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services provider data, tracks the number of obstetricians, gynecologists, and midwives per 100,000 women age 15 and older.
Unlike the JAMA study, the measure is not limited to physicians actively delivering babies, so the two datasets are not directly comparable. But it does provide an independent look at the broader reproductive-health workforce using the same methodology across all 50 states.
Those numbers have remained relatively stable in Idaho. America’s Health Rankings reported:
47.4 women’s-health providers per 100,000 women in 2021
45.8 in its 2023 report
47.5 in its 2024 report
The latest available federal provider data, from September 2025, put Idaho at 47.7 providers per 100,000 women (an apparent increase from all the years prior) — extremely close to the national rate of 48.1.
In fact, Idaho's women's-health provider rate in 2025 hit its highest rate in six years, showing consistent increase since 2023.
➡️ Strikingly, Idaho and Virginia (which couldn't be more different regarding state abortion law) were both close to the national average of 48.1, with Virginia coming in at 48.3 per 100,000 women in 2025. In 2024, the two states' rates were identical, at 47.5.
Among Idaho’s neighbors, rates ranged from a stunningly low 35.5 in pro-abortion Nevada to 73.3 in Oregon, with Wyoming at 46.8, Montana at 57.2, Utah at 54.2, and Washington at 57.9.
Interestingly, the pro-abortion state of California was significantly lower than Idaho, with a rate of 44.9 providers for every 100,000 women, further weakening the argument that pro-life laws are the cause of a shortage of women's health care providers.
It's also worth noting that the provider rates in Idaho didn't crater post-Dobbs as one might expect if pro-life laws were truly chasing away women's healthcare providers; in fact, they increased.
A separate JAMA study, released in April 2025 (just three months prior to the other JAMA study), analyzed 60,085 OBGYNs and noted that "the number of OBGYNs did not significantly change across policy environments, increasing by 8.3% in states where abortion is banned, 10.5% in states where it is threatened, and 7.7% in states where it is protected after the Dobbs decision."
Dr. Ingrid Skop, M.D., FACOG, pointed to this study as well, telling Live Action News:
Abortion activists have long claimed that pro-life laws would prompt a mass exodus of OB-GYNs from pro-life states, leaving women without access to obstetric care. However, the data hasn’t supported these claims. A 2025 JAMA study found 94% of OB-GYNs stayed in the same practice location when their state implemented pro-life protections, nearly the same rate as pro-abortion states.
The reality is the vast majority of OBs don’t perform elective abortions, so pro-life laws (as long as the emergency exceptions are properly understood) should not affect their practice or cause them to change locations.
Rather than perpetuate these baseless claims that have confused physicians and instilled fear into women, medical associations should educate physicians to prevent any confusion and reassure women that caring for their unborn children does not mean doctors cannot care for them also.
In October 2026, Gabrielle Sorresso, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy (and according to her CV, a member of the eugenicist-founded Population Association of America), released her own analysis of the number of OBGYNs in Idaho. She used publicly available federal data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Census Bureau. Sorresso compared Idaho's OBGYN numbers to those of neighboring (pro-abortion) Washington state. She wrote (emphasis added):
I measure the number of OB-GYNs billing Medicare per 100,000 women aged 15 to 44 in Idaho, in neighboring Washington, where abortion is protected, and in the United States as a whole. Idaho’s abortion ban took effect in August 2022.
Because the period before the ban (2016 to 2021) and the period after it (2022 to 2024) differ in length, I express the change in each as a yearly rate.
The number of OB-GYNs per woman in Idaho was falling before the ban and continued to fall after it. Washington followed a similar path over the same years, and the decline was faster after 2022 in both states and in the country as a whole.
This measure is imperfect, since it counts only OB-GYNs who billed Medicare for at least 11 patients in a year and so misses those who see few Medicare patients, often those focused on obstetrics. However, when comparing between states and across time this should matter less, as billing Medicare is plausibly unaffected by a ban.
Sorresso included a graph of her research, below, at GitHub...
... as well as this table:
Measures of maternal and infant health also show no deterioration since Idaho’s abortion restrictions took effect.
The 2025 March of Dimes Report Card, based primarily on 2024 birth data, gave Idaho a B-minus for preterm birth. Its preterm birth rate was 9.1 percent, compared with 10.4 percent nationally, ranking Idaho seventh among all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
The rate has fluctuated within a relatively narrow range over the past decade: 8.5 percent in 2020, 9.0 percent in 2021, 8.9 percent in 2022, 8.7 percent in 2023 and 9.1 percent in 2024. March of Dimes found that the increase between 2023 and 2024 was not statistically significant.
Other measures on the latest report card also place Idaho near or above national benchmarks:
Its infant mortality rate was 4.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 5.6 nationally, ranking eighth in the nation.
About 82.2% of births were to mothers receiving adequate prenatal care, ranking Idaho 10th in the nation.
Its low-risk cesarean rate of 20.1% ranked third, and its maternal mortality rate of 19.9 deaths per 100,000 births is lower than the national average of 23.5, with the state ranking 15th among states and jurisdictions with reportable data (better than the abortion destination state of Illinois).
While these measures don't directly disprove the JAMA study — as America’s Health Rankings includes gynecologists and midwives who may not deliver babies, and the March of Dimes figures measure health care utilization and outcomes rather than the exact number of physicians — the broader data provide important context.
A study published in JAMA Network Open in July 2025 claimed that the number of OB/GYNs practicing obstetrics in Idaho fell from 268 in August 2022 to 174 in December 2024, a net decline of 94 physicians, or 35%.
Researchers identified 114 doctors from the original group who stopped practicing in Idaho during that period, while 20 new OB/GYNs entered the state. Those who left the obstetric workforce did so for a variety of reasons, such as retiring or changing specialties, with just 23 leaving the state.
The timing of the decline has frequently been linked to Idaho’s post-Dobbs abortion laws protecting preborn children from abortion. The study itself explicitly blames the change on pro-life laws, opening with the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision and the subsequent passage of Idaho’s pro-life laws. The discussion specifically described the decline as having occurred “following changes in state-level abortion laws after Dobbs,” clearly insinuating the change in Idaho's laws were the cause of the decline.
That insinuation has since been repeated directly in news coverage, statements from medical groups, and policy debates, further suggesting that Idaho’s pro-life laws drove OB/GYNs out of the state.
Yet, while the JAMA study pointed to a decline after the laws changed, it was not designed to determine how many departures were caused by those laws.
Its numbers include physicians who retired, stopped practicing obstetrics, or otherwise left the workforce for reasons that may or may not have been related to abortion policy.
Of those who left Idaho, it is unclear how many, if any at all, did so specifically as a response to pro-life laws being enacted.
A 2022 article noted that "High Medical Malpractice Premiums Are Driving OB-GYNs Out of Business," and the March of Dimes points out that Idaho's fertility rate has been on the decline since 2014. Neither are noted by the JAMA study as possible contributing factors to a possible exit of OBGYNs from the state.
Questions about the July 2025 JAMA study’s underlying data have since become the subject of a public-records lawsuit against Boise State University.
In December 2025, the Idaho Family Policy Center requested “all documents” and “all data” related to the research.
Boise State provided just a two-page spreadsheet showing county-level numbers of OB/GYNs from 2022 through 2024. IFPC sued the university in July, arguing that a study drawing from licensing boards, physician websites, professional registries, local knowledge, and direct physician confirmation should have generated substantially more underlying documentation.
The lawsuit has since revealed that additional research files do, in fact, exist.
In court filings, Boise State acknowledged that co-author Jaden Traylor had produced multiple versions of the data for related research projects. The university described the spreadsheet provided to IFPC as a “preliminary dataset” that it believed was responsive to the request, while maintaining that other spreadsheets were outside the scope of what IFPC had asked for. Boise State has argued that it interpreted the request in good faith and provided the responsive material in its custody.
IFPC has also raised questions about apparent irregularities in the spreadsheet it received.
The group says two Idaho counties were shown as having negative numbers of OB/GYNs, an impossible result if those cells represented actual physician totals. It is unclear whether the negative numbers reflect a coding or transcription error, a mislabeled change variable, or a substantive problem with the underlying count.
Ada County District Judge Nancy Baskin has ordered the university to provide her with the disputed spreadsheets for an in-camera review before she rules on whether they must be released to IFPC. Boise State was given 10 days to provide those records. As of Oct. 28, no ruling had been issued.
IFPC says the hearing also revealed that researchers did not retain records documenting how they determined whether individual physicians had left Idaho or stopped practicing obstetrics.
In its account of the hearing, the group quoted Judge Baskin as responding that such a lack of records “seems like an unusual protocol for anything of a scientific nature.”
Though the lawsuit concerns Boise State’s compliance with Idaho’s public-records law, not a judicial review of the study’s scientific validity, the existence of additional datasets, the description of the released file as preliminary, and the unresolved questions about how physician-level classifications were documented have made the underlying research records part of an ongoing dispute over how valid the study's conclusion can truly be.
Idaho’s Defense of Life Act says, “Medical treatment provided to a pregnant woman by a health care professional as defined in this chapter that results in the accidental death of, or unintentional injury to, the unborn child shall not be a violation of this section.”
It seems unlikely, given the significant data from other sources, that women's lives are more at risk in Idaho post-Dobbs than prior to it.
Read more about how claims that pro-life laws drive medical professionals away is not supported by the data at the links below.
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
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·FACT CHECK: Did OB/GYNs leave Idaho over pro-life laws? Not likely.
A 2025 study published in the Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) is being used by abortion supporters to claim that obstetrician/gynecologists (OB/GYNs) fled the state after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. But is it true?
Abortion advocates are touting a highly contested 2025 study published in JAMA — insinuating that OB/GYNs fled Idaho after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade — to bolster their claim that Idaho's abortion law should be changed. But the best available evidence refutes the claim that Idaho’s pro-life protections have reduced the amount of women’s healthcare in the state.
Additional published JAMA research of significant cohort size contradicts the other JAMA study's claims, showing that "the number of OBGYNs did not significantly change across policy environments" after Dobbs, and even increased by more than 8% in states (like Idaho) where abortion is banned.
Other research shows that the number of Idaho's women's health practitioners (obstetricians, gynecologists, and midwives) is comparable to or better than that of multiple other states (including those that do not protect preborn children from abortion, like Virginia).
The latest available federal provider data, from September 2025, put Idaho at 47.7 women's health practitioners per 100,000 women — extremely close to the national rate of 48.1 — and at the state's highest women's health provider rate of the previous six years.
Is the availability of OB/GYN care a major issue in Idaho, beyond what's likewise occurring in other states? The answer appears to be no.
America’s Health Rankings, which uses federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services provider data, tracks the number of obstetricians, gynecologists, and midwives per 100,000 women age 15 and older.
Unlike the JAMA study, the measure is not limited to physicians actively delivering babies, so the two datasets are not directly comparable. But it does provide an independent look at the broader reproductive-health workforce using the same methodology across all 50 states.
Those numbers have remained relatively stable in Idaho. America’s Health Rankings reported:
47.4 women’s-health providers per 100,000 women in 2021
45.8 in its 2023 report
47.5 in its 2024 report
The latest available federal provider data, from September 2025, put Idaho at 47.7 providers per 100,000 women (an apparent increase from all the years prior) — extremely close to the national rate of 48.1.
In fact, Idaho's women's-health provider rate in 2025 hit its highest rate in six years, showing consistent increase since 2023.
➡️ Strikingly, Idaho and Virginia (which couldn't be more different regarding state abortion law) were both close to the national average of 48.1, with Virginia coming in at 48.3 per 100,000 women in 2025. In 2024, the two states' rates were identical, at 47.5.
Among Idaho’s neighbors, rates ranged from a stunningly low 35.5 in pro-abortion Nevada to 73.3 in Oregon, with Wyoming at 46.8, Montana at 57.2, Utah at 54.2, and Washington at 57.9.
Interestingly, the pro-abortion state of California was significantly lower than Idaho, with a rate of 44.9 providers for every 100,000 women, further weakening the argument that pro-life laws are the cause of a shortage of women's health care providers.
It's also worth noting that the provider rates in Idaho didn't crater post-Dobbs as one might expect if pro-life laws were truly chasing away women's healthcare providers; in fact, they increased.
A separate JAMA study, released in April 2025 (just three months prior to the other JAMA study), analyzed 60,085 OBGYNs and noted that "the number of OBGYNs did not significantly change across policy environments, increasing by 8.3% in states where abortion is banned, 10.5% in states where it is threatened, and 7.7% in states where it is protected after the Dobbs decision."
Dr. Ingrid Skop, M.D., FACOG, pointed to this study as well, telling Live Action News:
Abortion activists have long claimed that pro-life laws would prompt a mass exodus of OB-GYNs from pro-life states, leaving women without access to obstetric care. However, the data hasn’t supported these claims. A 2025 JAMA study found 94% of OB-GYNs stayed in the same practice location when their state implemented pro-life protections, nearly the same rate as pro-abortion states.
The reality is the vast majority of OBs don’t perform elective abortions, so pro-life laws (as long as the emergency exceptions are properly understood) should not affect their practice or cause them to change locations.
Rather than perpetuate these baseless claims that have confused physicians and instilled fear into women, medical associations should educate physicians to prevent any confusion and reassure women that caring for their unborn children does not mean doctors cannot care for them also.
In October 2026, Gabrielle Sorresso, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy (and according to her CV, a member of the eugenicist-founded Population Association of America), released her own analysis of the number of OBGYNs in Idaho. She used publicly available federal data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Census Bureau. Sorresso compared Idaho's OBGYN numbers to those of neighboring (pro-abortion) Washington state. She wrote (emphasis added):
I measure the number of OB-GYNs billing Medicare per 100,000 women aged 15 to 44 in Idaho, in neighboring Washington, where abortion is protected, and in the United States as a whole. Idaho’s abortion ban took effect in August 2022.
Because the period before the ban (2016 to 2021) and the period after it (2022 to 2024) differ in length, I express the change in each as a yearly rate.
The number of OB-GYNs per woman in Idaho was falling before the ban and continued to fall after it. Washington followed a similar path over the same years, and the decline was faster after 2022 in both states and in the country as a whole.
This measure is imperfect, since it counts only OB-GYNs who billed Medicare for at least 11 patients in a year and so misses those who see few Medicare patients, often those focused on obstetrics. However, when comparing between states and across time this should matter less, as billing Medicare is plausibly unaffected by a ban.
Sorresso included a graph of her research, below, at GitHub...
... as well as this table:
Measures of maternal and infant health also show no deterioration since Idaho’s abortion restrictions took effect.
The 2025 March of Dimes Report Card, based primarily on 2024 birth data, gave Idaho a B-minus for preterm birth. Its preterm birth rate was 9.1 percent, compared with 10.4 percent nationally, ranking Idaho seventh among all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
The rate has fluctuated within a relatively narrow range over the past decade: 8.5 percent in 2020, 9.0 percent in 2021, 8.9 percent in 2022, 8.7 percent in 2023 and 9.1 percent in 2024. March of Dimes found that the increase between 2023 and 2024 was not statistically significant.
Other measures on the latest report card also place Idaho near or above national benchmarks:
Its infant mortality rate was 4.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 5.6 nationally, ranking eighth in the nation.
About 82.2% of births were to mothers receiving adequate prenatal care, ranking Idaho 10th in the nation.
Its low-risk cesarean rate of 20.1% ranked third, and its maternal mortality rate of 19.9 deaths per 100,000 births is lower than the national average of 23.5, with the state ranking 15th among states and jurisdictions with reportable data (better than the abortion destination state of Illinois).
While these measures don't directly disprove the JAMA study — as America’s Health Rankings includes gynecologists and midwives who may not deliver babies, and the March of Dimes figures measure health care utilization and outcomes rather than the exact number of physicians — the broader data provide important context.
A study published in JAMA Network Open in July 2025 claimed that the number of OB/GYNs practicing obstetrics in Idaho fell from 268 in August 2022 to 174 in December 2024, a net decline of 94 physicians, or 35%.
Researchers identified 114 doctors from the original group who stopped practicing in Idaho during that period, while 20 new OB/GYNs entered the state. Those who left the obstetric workforce did so for a variety of reasons, such as retiring or changing specialties, with just 23 leaving the state.
The timing of the decline has frequently been linked to Idaho’s post-Dobbs abortion laws protecting preborn children from abortion. The study itself explicitly blames the change on pro-life laws, opening with the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision and the subsequent passage of Idaho’s pro-life laws. The discussion specifically described the decline as having occurred “following changes in state-level abortion laws after Dobbs,” clearly insinuating the change in Idaho's laws were the cause of the decline.
That insinuation has since been repeated directly in news coverage, statements from medical groups, and policy debates, further suggesting that Idaho’s pro-life laws drove OB/GYNs out of the state.
Yet, while the JAMA study pointed to a decline after the laws changed, it was not designed to determine how many departures were caused by those laws.
Its numbers include physicians who retired, stopped practicing obstetrics, or otherwise left the workforce for reasons that may or may not have been related to abortion policy.
Of those who left Idaho, it is unclear how many, if any at all, did so specifically as a response to pro-life laws being enacted.
A 2022 article noted that "High Medical Malpractice Premiums Are Driving OB-GYNs Out of Business," and the March of Dimes points out that Idaho's fertility rate has been on the decline since 2014. Neither are noted by the JAMA study as possible contributing factors to a possible exit of OBGYNs from the state.
Questions about the July 2025 JAMA study’s underlying data have since become the subject of a public-records lawsuit against Boise State University.
In December 2025, the Idaho Family Policy Center requested “all documents” and “all data” related to the research.
Boise State provided just a two-page spreadsheet showing county-level numbers of OB/GYNs from 2022 through 2024. IFPC sued the university in July, arguing that a study drawing from licensing boards, physician websites, professional registries, local knowledge, and direct physician confirmation should have generated substantially more underlying documentation.
The lawsuit has since revealed that additional research files do, in fact, exist.
In court filings, Boise State acknowledged that co-author Jaden Traylor had produced multiple versions of the data for related research projects. The university described the spreadsheet provided to IFPC as a “preliminary dataset” that it believed was responsive to the request, while maintaining that other spreadsheets were outside the scope of what IFPC had asked for. Boise State has argued that it interpreted the request in good faith and provided the responsive material in its custody.
IFPC has also raised questions about apparent irregularities in the spreadsheet it received.
The group says two Idaho counties were shown as having negative numbers of OB/GYNs, an impossible result if those cells represented actual physician totals. It is unclear whether the negative numbers reflect a coding or transcription error, a mislabeled change variable, or a substantive problem with the underlying count.
Ada County District Judge Nancy Baskin has ordered the university to provide her with the disputed spreadsheets for an in-camera review before she rules on whether they must be released to IFPC. Boise State was given 10 days to provide those records. As of Oct. 28, no ruling had been issued.
IFPC says the hearing also revealed that researchers did not retain records documenting how they determined whether individual physicians had left Idaho or stopped practicing obstetrics.
In its account of the hearing, the group quoted Judge Baskin as responding that such a lack of records “seems like an unusual protocol for anything of a scientific nature.”
Though the lawsuit concerns Boise State’s compliance with Idaho’s public-records law, not a judicial review of the study’s scientific validity, the existence of additional datasets, the description of the released file as preliminary, and the unresolved questions about how physician-level classifications were documented have made the underlying research records part of an ongoing dispute over how valid the study's conclusion can truly be.
Idaho’s Defense of Life Act says, “Medical treatment provided to a pregnant woman by a health care professional as defined in this chapter that results in the accidental death of, or unintentional injury to, the unborn child shall not be a violation of this section.”
It seems unlikely, given the significant data from other sources, that women's lives are more at risk in Idaho post-Dobbs than prior to it.
Read more about how claims that pro-life laws drive medical professionals away is not supported by the data at the links below.
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
Bridget Sielicki
·Fact Checks
Nancy Flanders
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Cassy Cooke
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Nancy Flanders
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Nancy Flanders
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Carole Novielli
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Cassy Cooke
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Cassy Cooke
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