Abortion Bans Can Hinder Life-Saving Care for Pregnant Patients with Lung Disease or Medical Crises—Study

The abortion restrictions imposed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 aren’t just disrupting obstetric and gynecological care and making OB-GYNs avoid or leave states with bans. They are also forcing doctors in other medical fields—including pulmonary and critical care—to change how they provide care, often to the detriment of pregnant patients, a recent study found.

The peer-reviewed research documents how abortion bans are delaying or restricting care that pregnant people need, as well as complicating treatment for a range of health conditions, even when they have nothing to do with pregnancy.

Published in August 2025 in the journal CHEST—a publication of the professional society of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine providers—the paper marks one of the first attempts to log the impacts of abortion bans on doctors beyond OB-GYNs.

Some ‘patients didn’t make it’

The researchers interviewed 29 pulmonary and critical care physicians in 15 states with abortion bans and in neighboring states. Pulmonary and critical care providers staff intensive care units (ICUs), where pregnant and postpartum patients with hemorrhage or severe infection often end up.

Outside of the ICU, pulmonologists treat pregnant patients for chronic lung conditions that affect pregnancy, such as pulmonary hypertension, a condition in which blood pressure is high in the arteries that supply blood to the lungs.

The doctors surveyed said they had to wait to treat patients until death was imminent to avoid violating abortion-restricting laws. The bans also restricted their ability to prescribe certain drugs used to manage lung conditions because they could cause birth defects or pregnancy loss, they said.

One pulmonary and critical care doctor surveyed said that a patient with an ectopic pregnancy spent 12 hours in the emergency room and developed “hemorrhagic shock” before getting surgery. The provider, who said the patient was ultimately okay, told the researchers that the delay “was almost certainly a result of the legislation and the uncertainty around what is an imminent threat in the life of the mother.”

Such crises have caused many of the doctors surveyed to feel moral distress and burnout.

Abortion bans have also caused problems for people receiving care for certain lung conditions. Pregnancy is life-threatening for patients with pulmonary hypertension, said Katrina Hauschildt, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the division of pulmonary, allergy, and critical care medicine at Oregon Health & Science University.

“Doctors know, as soon as a patient who has pulmonary hypertension becomes pregnant, that this is going to be a threat to her life,” Hauschildt said. “But when you’re six weeks pregnant, it may not actually be life-threatening. It’s going to be life-threatening when you are in your third trimester.”

Hauschildt said patients with pulmonary hypertension are cautioned against getting pregnant. But sometimes they do. Typically, their doctor would advise them that abortion is an option they should consider.

Some of the physicians Hauschildt interviewed, however, said they weren’t sure what they could say to patients now.

“I did have physicians who told me that they felt like they weren’t really allowed to advise patients to get a termination,” she said. “And some of those patients didn’t make it through their pregnancies.”

Doctors have reported problems with pharmacies filling prescriptions for drugs like methotrexate that can cause miscarriage—even when prescribing medication to male patients, Hauschildt said. (Clinically speaking, miscarriage care is often identical to abortion care.)

If people who take these drugs to manage their lung conditions become pregnant, they often have to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy or stop taking the medication. But sometimes this means switching to a less effective drug, which can lead to permanent harm to their health, Hauschildt said.

Disparate impacts

Experts have previously established that abortion bans widen existing health-care disparities, and disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income people. Sixty percent of Black women and 59 percent of Indigenous women ages 18-49 live in states with abortion bans or restrictions. For women of other racial and ethnic groups, these percentages are lower.

Likewise, women of color have higher rates of certain lung conditions that doctors pointed to in this study. Pulmonary hypertension is more common in Black and Hispanic people; sarcoidosis is especially common in Black women.

States with abortion bans also have higher rates of both maternal and infant mortality. And Black mothers who live in states with abortion bans are more than three times as likely as white mothers in those same states to die during pregnancy, while giving birth, or soon after birth, according to an analysis of 2019-2023 data by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

Why care could worsen

It’s well established that state abortion bans have impacted OB-GYN care. Doctors, including emergency department physicians, have reported having to delay or deny care to patients facing life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, dangerous miscarriage complications, and severe infection. Pregnant people have died as a result.

Thirty-five percent of Idaho’s OB-GYNs stopped practicing or left the state between August 2022 and December 2024, after Roe was overturned.

The effect of abortion bans is “more than just the maternal piece,” Dr. Yolanda Lawson, an OB-GYN in Texas, told Rewire News Group. “There is a downstream impact broadly on women’s health.”

Hauschildt’s research on pulmonary and critical care doctors is part of a growing body of evidence supporting Lawson’s concern.

Rheumatologists, who treat autoimmune diseases, feared prescribing certain medications because of abortion bans, according to a forthcoming chapter of the textbook Interdisciplinary Rheumatology: Reproductive Health Issues in Rheumatology written by a University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor.

And a September 2025 brief from nonprofit health advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights found that neurologists, oncologists, and other medical specialties where common treatments for disease are pregnancy-ending or birth-defect-inducing medications reported changing the way they prescribed drugs in the wake of state-level abortion bans.

These impacts are causing some future doctors to avoid training in states that ban abortion.

Surveys of medical students, residents, and practicing physicians in various specialties have shown that abortion bans are influencing where providers want to practice.

The number of residency applicants in states with abortion bans decreased by 4.2 percent in the 2023-2024 cycle from the previous cycle, following a decrease the previous year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. In states where abortion was legal, the decrease was 0.6 percent.

In Tennessee, where OB-GYN Dr. Laura Andreson practices, the number of applicants for OB-GYN residency spots in 2024 decreased 20.9 percent from the previous year, and for other specialties, it decreased 12.7 percent. Andreson said that, from her perspective, “The reason we see the decrease in other specialties is that people are afraid to be pregnant here. They’re afraid to have their spouse be pregnant here.”

Why the consequences may be too sweeping to quantify

We’re only starting to see the broader impacts of these bans, Hauschildt said.

“Rheumatologists have talked about how this affects their patients. Immunologists have talked about how this affects their patients,” Hauschildt said. Only as people start to “enumerate all of the ways that doctors are saying, ‘Oh, this is actually affecting my patient, too,’ do we realize that we’re never going to be able to actually quantify this.”

Hauschildt added, “The number of women whose health has been damaged, whose fertility has been damaged, whose lives have been lost because of these bans—we actually probably can’t fully enumerate.”

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