Barbra Streisand is famous for promising to move to Canada, but then living quietly under two Trump dictatorships. See “‘I really will’: the stars who didn’t move to Canada when Trump won” (Guardian, 2018), for example:
Who are Streisand’s counterparts in the world of medicine? Ob/gyns. “Ob/Gyns Mostly Stayed Put After SCOTUS Overturned Roe, Study Finds” (MedPageToday, April 21, 2025):
There was no population-level ob/gyn exodus away from abortion-restrictive states post-Roe.
From the quarter right before the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision through the end of the study in September 2024, 95.8% of ob/gyns remained in states that protect access to abortion, 94.8% remained in states threatening bans, and 94.2% remained in states with abortion bans, reported Becky Staiger, PhD, of the University of California Berkeley, and colleagues.
“The only statistically significant difference suggested that the share of physicians who are ob/gyns decreased less in threatened states than in protected ones, opposite to the expected finding if ob/gyns were leaving states where abortion is threatened,” the authors wrote.
(I apologize for the hateful language in which “abortion care” is presented without the “care”.)
The full article says “Numerous media reports have described physicians leaving states where abortion is banned in response to these concerns, including cases of retirement or migration”.
Where should an ob/gyn passionate about delivering abortion care have moved? Maskachusetts law allows abortion care at 37 weeks of pregnancy or even more if a single physician believes that the abortion care will preserve “the patient’s … mental health”:
If a pregnancy has existed for 24 weeks or more, no abortion may be performed except by a physician, and only if in the best medical judgement of the physician it is: (i) necessary to preserve the life of the patient; (ii) necessary to preserve the patient’s physical or mental health; (iii) warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis; or (iv) warranted because of a grave fetal diagnosis that indicates that the fetus is incompatible with sustained life outside of the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions.
(Abortion care is “on demand” through 24 weeks.)