What the future holds
Ms. Jivraj said that she’s concerned about what the future holds, especially if the law does not change in Texas. “I don’t want to go to work every day wondering if I’m going to go to jail for something that I say,” she said.
Dr. Crifase has similar fears. “I want to be able to provide the best care for my patients and that would require being able to do those procedures without having to have my first thought be: Is this legal?”
“Things feel very volatile and uncertain,” Pamela Merritt, executive director of the nonprofit Medical Students for Choice in Philadelphia, where abortion is permitted, said. “What we’re asking medical students to do right now is to envision a future in a profession, a lifetime of providing care, where the policies and procedures and standards of the profession are under attack by 26 state legislatures and the federal court system,” she said.
“I don’t think you’re going to see people as willing to take risk.” She added that if someone matches to a program and then has regrets, “You can’t easily jump from residency program to residency program.”
Dr. Levy believes that the impact of the Dobbs decision is “definitely going to be a more common question of applicants to their potential programs.”
Applicants undoubtedly are thinking about how abortion restrictions or bans might affect their own health or that of their partners or families, she said. In a 2022 survey, Dr. Levy and colleagues reported that abortion is not uncommon among physicians, with 11.5% of the 1,566 respondents who had been pregnant saying they had at least one therapeutic abortion.
Students are also considering the potential ramification of a ban on emergency contraception and laws that criminalize physicians’ provision of abortion care, Dr. Levy said. Another complicating factor is individuals’ family ties or roots in specific geographic areas, she said.
Prospective residents will also have a lot of questions about how they will receive family planning training, Dr. Levy commented. “If you’re somewhere that you can’t really provide full-spectrum reproductive health care, then the question will become: How is the program going to provide that training?”
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.