'We needed to leave Oklahoma': New report shows MAGA abortion laws are displacing doctors

Far-right culture war laws are driving young, educated professionals out of red states in huge numbers, reported The New Republic this week — and abortion restrictions are having a particularly strong effect.

"Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies," reported Timothy Noah. "Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of 'divisive concepts' about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers."

"The only red state that brings in more college graduates than it sends elsewhere is Texas," said the report. "The number of applications for OB-GYN residencies is down more than 10 percent in states that have banned abortion since Dobbs." And it's not just abortion — 48 teachers in Hernando County, Florida resigned or retired last year in part due to the infamous "Don't Say Gay" law. "A survey of college faculty in four red states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) about political interference in higher education found a falloff in the number of job candidates for faculty positions, and 67 percent of the respondents said they would not recommend their state to colleagues as a place to work. Indeed, nearly one-third said they were actively considering employment elsewhere."

One family that decided to leave their state were Kate Arnold and Caroline Flint, a pair of OB/GYNs raising five kids together in Oklahoma. Fed up with gun violence and pushes to restrict contraception, they were pushed over the edge by the Supreme Court's decision to allow states to prohibit abortion, which opened the floodgates where they lived and made it hard for them to treat any pregnancy complication — even though they don't perform abortions themselves.

“When we left dinner that night,” Kate told TNR, “we knew we needed to leave Oklahoma. We were both in a bit of shock as we walked back to our room. I said I was sorry, and that I didn’t know I had been thinking all of that till we finally had a minute. Caroline jokingly called me the worst date ever.”

Some voters in these states, notably, are beginning to fight back against the most extreme of these policies. Ohio voters just approved a state constitutional amendment codifying Roe v. Wade protections, and candidates affiliated with the far-right education group Moms for Liberty suffered defeats in state legislative and school board races all over the country in 2023.