Dr. Peters highlights additional research on the effect of the Dobbs ruling on urologists

In this video, Chloe E. Peters, MD, discusses additional research building off of the study, “Attitudes among Society of Women in Urology Members Toward Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” for which she served as the lead author. Peters is a urology resident at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Video Transcript:

We did an additional study where we surveyed all of the medical students who applied to urology this year. SWIU was obviously a select subset of urologists, and I think it's important since they're also the ones who are most directly affected by these laws, but we wanted to survey everybody who's coming in. We found pretty substantial impact. So, 1 in 5 applicants took programs off their list because they were located in states where abortion is illegal, which is also a really big number.

When people graduate residency, over half of residents stay in the state where they trained. So, if people are not training in certain states, and the distribution of where people go for training is changing, that's going to change the demographics and the distribution of people in practice in 5, 6, 7, 8 years. So, we've done that.

We also want to do some additional studies, hopefully looking at senior residents and fellows who are looking for jobs and actively going through this process of finding work now that Dobbs has happened and see how this is impacting people's decisions in real time. Then obviously, this is such a dynamic topic. Laws are different now than they were 5 months ago, and 8 months ago, so we want to repeat some of these surveys to see how people might have changed their feelings with a little bit more time.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.