When it comes to abortion laws, Democrats and their media allies have no qualms about lying in the service of their agenda.
Last year, during the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris repeatedly blamed Georgia's abortion regulations for the death of Amber Nicole Thurman. Thurman died of complications after driving from Georgia to North Carolina and being prescribed the abortion pills. On August 18, 2002, days after taking the second abortion pill, Thurman began throwing up blood and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors performed a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to remove the "retained products of conception." Her cause of death was septic shock from those "retained products of conception." Harris's politicization of Thurman's death was so brazen that Thurman's family asked her to stop. She did not.
In May of this year, the media lied again about Georgia's abortion laws, claiming they forced doctors to keep Adriana Smith alive after Smith suffered blood clots in her brain. At the time, Smith was 21 weeks pregnant. But it wasn't Georgia's abortion laws that kept her alive. GA Code § 31-32-9, enacted in 2007, states that a pregnant woman cannot be removed from life support unless she has advanced directives outlining her wishes or the pregnancy is not viable. Smith did not have an advanced directive, and her son, Chance, was delivered prematurely in June.
Georgia is not the only state the Left has lied about. They also lied about abortion laws in South Carolina and Nevada.
Now, they've taken their anti-abortion law fear-mongering to a whole new level: blaming such legislation for doctor shortages.
Yes, the mainstream press is this depraved. pic.twitter.com/ExXcdXiEip
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) September 21, 2025
Beyond the four years of medical education it takes to earn an MD, abortion bans are also influencing where prospective doctors choose to get their specialty training, and where they potentially choose to practice. A recent report from the Association of American Medical Colleges showed that states with abortion bans saw fewer residency applications compared to states with no bans. The discrepancy was even greater for prospective OB-GYNs. These numbers don’t just impact the lives of the medical residents, they directly harm communities in states with abortion bans.
Nearly half of doctors practice in the same state where they completed their residency. So for every student who’s deterred from practicing in a banned state, a community likely loses out on a caring, passionate medical expert. Because the number of residency applicants far outpaces available training positions (which is a key driver of the national physician shortage), most residency positions are still being filled, but not necessarily with the ideal candidate for the communities they will serve, which potentially drives up their likelihood of leaving the state to establish their practices.
The states that most heavily restrict abortion are also the ones already experiencing an acute shortage of doctors. States like Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Arkansas have around 200 physicians per 100,000 residents. Nationally, that number is 272, while states with aging and complex populations need far more. This trend has been years in the making, with rural hospitals across the country steadily closing, and the overturning of Roe is only accelerating it.
This is, of course, dishonest. Yes, there's a shortage of doctors, but it's not driven by anti-abortion legislation. California, a state not known for anti-abortion laws, also has a doctor shortage. The California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) says up to 15 million Californians live in areas without enough primary care providers, and a quarter of doctors in the state are age 65+.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the demand for doctors -- driven by an aging population -- is far outpacing the supply, and the organization predicts we will be short 80,000+ doctors by 2036. They also note almost half of doctors are at or nearing retirement age.
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) blames the 1997 Balanced Budget Act for capping the Medicare funding for residency training, creating a "bottleneck" in the education and training process for new doctors.
Burnout and administrative overload are other factors contributing to the doctor shortage, according to the Mayo Clinic. Doctors cited authorization delays and extensive charting demands as contributing to that burnout.
Medicare also reimburses primary care physicians far less than their procedural or specialty counterparts, thus discouraging doctors from entering that particular specialty.
So while there are serious concerns and issues that need to be addressed for the doctor shortage, abortion is not the driving cause behind the dearth of doctors. TIME knows this, but -- much like the Left's other lies about state-level anti-abortion laws -- it prefers to peddle the pro-abortion narrative.
