For women's health providers, the Dobbs decision that rescinded abortion rights wasn't just an abstract political event.
"It changed the legal and professional environment in which they care for patients," said Binghamton University Assistant Professor of Political Science Hilary Izatt.
While earlier research suggested that physicians vote at lower rates than the general public, more recent work drawing on voter files finds that they voted at relatively high rates in 2020 and 2022. The question: Did the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 decision prompt women's health providers to become more engaged relative to other politically engaged physician groups?
The answer is yes.
A recent article in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law explored the dynamic. "Abortion Politics: Physician Mobilization in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision" was co-authored by Kelly Hunter of Northwestern University, Michael E. Shepherd of the University of Michigan, Izatt, Eve Bryner of American University and Alister Martin of Harvard Medical School.
The study relies upon a dataset of 6,205 physicians involved in Vot-ER, a healthcare-based get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaign. It compares women's health providers to other physicians within the same nonpartisan program.
While healthcare facilities don't typically spring to mind when it comes to voting initiatives, mobilization campaigns in healthcare settings are becoming more popular. After all, voting and health policy are deeply connected, Izatt said.
"Physicians who joined Vot-ER were already civically engaged, making it more difficult-not easier-to detect differences between groups. Yet even within this highly engaged population, women's health providers became more politically active after Dobbs," Izatt explained. "That suggests the relationship is meaningful and not simply a product of comparing politically interested people to politically uninterested people."
The research shows that women's health providers increased from about 10% of Vot-ER physician participants in 2020 to more than 15% in 2022, a roughly 50% increase.
The study also examined the timing of physician signups around the leak of the Supreme Court's draft opinion in May 2022. Using a statistical approach called a regression discontinuity design, they found a statistically significant 4.8 to 6.7 percentage-point increase in the share of Vot-ER badge orders from women's health providers immediately after the leak.
"This approach is often considered one of the strongest forms of observational evidence available to social scientists," Izatt said. "We take advantage of a real-world event and examine whether behavior changes abruptly at the moment that event becomes public. In many ways, this is about as close as researchers can get to an experiment when studying major policy changes that have already happened."
About 6.4% of women's health providers voted in their first midterm election in 2022, compared with 5.7% of other providers. While that number may look small, it's meaningful among a group already more likely to be civically engaged, she said. Among Democratic physicians, women's health providers were also 6.3% more likely to vote than physicians with other specialties.
Overall, the difference between female and male women's health providers was statistically insignificant, suggesting that mobilization was driven more by the voter's professional role than their gender alone.
Researchers, campaigns and civic organizations may want to think beyond traditional voter mobilization strategies. While political science has long focused on demographic groups such as race, gender, age, and party, major policy changes can also activate people through their professional identities, Izatt pointed out.
The broader theory is that when a sudden policy shift directly affects a professional group's work, expertise, patients, or moral commitments, that group may become more politically engaged. In that light, we may expect similar patterns among infectious disease doctors after COVID-related policy conflicts, educators after curriculum battles, or climate scientists, but each would need to be studied empirically.
"Healthcare is already connected to democratic participation because policy decisions shape patients' lives and providers' work. Dobbs simply made that connection especially visible," she said.
