2024-04-16 10:05:15
An Open Letter to House Speaker Mike Moyle and the Idaho Legislature:
If you aren’t sure why doctors are leaving Idaho at this point, it’s because you are not listening to them.
Perhaps you missed an early informal survey from the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare showing 75 of 117 physicians surveyed in Idaho answered “yes” or “maybe” when asked if they were considering leaving the state. Seventy-three of 75 respondents cited Idaho’s restrictive abortion laws as the reason.
Maybe you didn’t know that Dr. Lauren Miller told CNN that her greatest fear was “being tried as a felon simply for saving someone’s life.” Dr. Miller is a maternal fetal medicine physician, a high risk pregnancy doctor, who previously lived and worked in Boise. She now practices medicine in Colorado.
Idaho is losing OB-GYNs after strict abortion ban. But health exceptions unlikely this year.
Perhaps you didn’t see the survey showing that 22% of practicing obstetricians have left the state since the abortion bans took effect according to a report by the Idaho Physician Well-Being Action Collaborative.
In case you missed it, Dr. Kylie Cooper is a maternal fetal medicine physician, an expert in complicated pregnancies, who moved from Idaho to Minnesota. Regarding the move she said, “It was a really difficult decision to make … my husband and I had many conversations about what would it actually look like if I was charged with a felony and then went to prison.”
Dr. Sara Thomson, OB/GYN in Boise, said: “Many of us have had a crisis of conscience about what to do. Feeling both deeply committed to our patients, but also concerned about what this means for us personally and for our own families. The threat of incarceration for five years for patient care is a heavy burden. And being told that no physician in our state has been prosecuted — yet — or that a case of medical necessity is unlikely to be prosecuted, is not adequately reassuring.”
Bonner General Health is one of three Idaho hospitals that have closed their labor and delivery department so far. You should know that none of the three OB/GYNs who worked there up until the closure even considered looking for another job in Idaho after the closure was announced. All three of them have moved to a state without abortion restrictions.
You could listen to my own words about practicing obstetrics and gynecology in Idaho for more than a decade on “This American Life,” in an episode aptly called “When to Leave.” Shortly after that interview, my physician husband and I decided to leave Idaho. It was heartbreaking to leave the community we loved. It was anything but convenient to take our children away from the only place they had ever called home. We are still grieving being forced to leave Idaho, and yet we are profoundly relieved to be a state that doesn’t allow government interference in health care.
“These laws are decimating our workforce,” said dr. John Werdelmedical director of Women’s Services at St. Luke’s. “For the physicians that stay, they’re dispirited and have a low-level anxiety which increases their burnout. It’s an inability to recruit, an inability to retain, it harms the workforce and it creates risk and harm to our citizens.”
Criminalization of doctors providing health care is dangerous for patients, for doctors and for our communities. For a state lagging behind the rest of the nation in per capita physicians, laws that allow the government to interfere in the practice of medicine and that drive doctors out of the state are unwise. You can choose to ignore physician voices. But we will not be silent as patients continue to suffer injury and harm under these laws.
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