These 3 OB-GYNs Won’t Leave Texas—Even as Abortion Bans Threaten Their Work

FROM THE ARTICLE

“We can’t all just move to very blue states. We have our community ties here, and these communities still deserve strong OB-GYNs.”
PRH Fellow Victoria Petruzzi

Our “communities still deserve strong OB-GYNs,” one doctor said.

Dr. Damla Karsan, an OB-GYN in Houston, Texas, has considered leaving the state to practice medicine somewhere else.

Several years ago, when Texas was ramping up its abortion restrictions, she was being recruited to a hospital in North Carolina, where she did her residency training. The offer was tempting. Even without Texas’ conservative laws around reproductive health, Texas politics overall weren’t exactly in line with Karsan’s. She thought North Carolina might be a nice change of pace.

But Karsan, a born-and-raised Houstonian has cared for patients in the area for more than 20 years, including Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski, who both sued the state of Texas in 2023 after they were denied abortion care. She said she couldn’t bring herself to leave her patients behind—not even as new laws have made it nearly impossible for pregnant people to get abortion care in Texas.