The OB/GYN shortage is here and it's getting worse with patients being turned away

Your annual well-woman exam gets scheduled six weeks out, then eight, then you’re told the soonest available appointment is four months away. You reschedule twice. By the time you finally sit in the exam room, you’ve been putting off a concern about irregular bleeding that probably would have been worth mentioning sooner. Appointment backlogs like this reflect something much larger than scheduling friction.

A January 2026 study in Obstetrics & Gynecology found that the national supply of OB/GYNs currently meets only 93.4% of demand, with significant geographic disparities already stretching the system beyond what most patients can see from inside a waiting room. That 6.6% gap sounds modest until you map it against real geography. More than one-third of U.S. counties are now classified as maternity care deserts, meaning there is no hospital or birth center, and no obstetric clinician. More than 2.3 million women of childbearing age live inside those counties.

The appointments women are struggling to book right now, the rural hospitals that quietly stopped delivering babies, the residents choosing not to train in certain states – it’s already in motion. And according to projections published in January 2026, the trajectory only gets steeper.

The Numbers Behind the Wait

In 2025, the national OB/GYN supply met 93.4% of demand. By 2035, all but six states are projected to experience inadequate supplies of ob-gyns, with a particularly severe shortfall in nonmetropolitan areas. If you live in a rural or semi-rural county today and you can still get a same-month appointment with a gynecologist, you are in a small and shrinking group.

From 2025 to 2037, demand for OB/GYNs is projected to increase by 2.7%, while supply is projected to decrease by 10.3%. Workforce adequacy is projected to drop from 93.4% to 81.7% over that same period. Non-metropolitan areas are projected to reach only 51.4% workforce adequacy by 2037, meaning rural patients would have access to roughly half the OB/GYN capacity they actually need. The states facing the most severe projected shortfalls include Utah at 49.3%, Idaho at 51.5%, and Arizona at 58.3%.

The hospital side of the picture is just as stark. A 2024 study published in JAMA found that between 2010 and 2022, more than 500 hospitals in the U.S. closed their obstetric units, with rural hospitals accounting for nearly half of those closures. In the first half of 2025 alone, the number of rural labor and delivery hospitals that closed or announced closures nearly matched the total for all of 2024. Each closure doesn’t just inconvenience patients, it turns the nearest remaining hospital into the only option for an entire county, or sometimes several counties at once.

Who’s Actually Going Into This Field

Part of what makes the OB/GYN shortage so resistant to quick fixes is where the problem lives: in the pipeline itself. In the 2025 residency Match, 1,604 OB/GYN positions were offered, and only ten went unfilled - one categorical position and nine preliminary PGY-1 slots. The specialty remains competitive for available seats, but the total number of training positions constrains how many physicians can enter the field each year, and residency capacity has not kept pace with projected demand.

From 2022 to 2026, OB/GYN residency capacity grew by only about 9%, while workforce pressures – rising demand, provider burnout, and uneven geographic distribution – continued to compound. The doctors who are training aren’t replacing those who are retiring at anything close to a one-to-one rate.

The average age of OB/GYNs in maternal and fetal medicine was 57 in 2025, compared to a general physician average of 54.4 and the broader U.S. labor force median of 41.8. With many OB/GYN specialists approaching retirement, the gap between those exiting the field and those entering it is growing. Adding to that strain, an increasing number of OB/GYN residents are pursuing subspecialties – including gynecologic oncology, maternal-fetal medicine, reproductive endocrinology, and female pelvic medicine – driven by higher compensation and residency training caps. While specialized care is necessary, it shrinks the pool of physicians available for the full range of general care that most women need.

The Geography of Who Gets Left Behind

The OB/GYN shortage doesn’t distribute itself evenly. The women who can least afford to drive two hours for a prenatal appointment are often the ones who live farthest from the nearest OB/GYN. Rural women already face the longest travel times – sometimes more than an hour each way – for basic prenatal care. Low-income and uninsured women often find that when a local practice closes or stops taking their insurance, the out-of-network alternatives are functionally inaccessible.

Physicians in states with sparse coverage are already describing patients who get referred out of state – not for complex procedures, but for appointments. Routine things. The kind of care that catches cervical abnormalities early, that monitors high-risk pregnancies, that gives women their annual exam and the unhurried fifteen minutes to ask the question they’ve been putting off for a year.

A significant portion of women use their OB/GYN as their de facto primary care provider – the person who catches high blood pressure at a Pap smear, who orders the thyroid panel, who notices something in the breast tissue that a woman herself hasn’t felt yet. When access to that doctor disappears, so does that entire thread of surveillance. The history of women’s health being treated as secondary to other medical specialties makes this pattern familiar, even as the underlying cause shifts from cultural dismissal to structural collapse. That history is part of what makes this moment feel heavier than the statistics alone convey, as anyone who has read about the husband stitch and the long tradition of dismissing women’s pain will recognize.

What Dobbs Did to the Pipeline

The Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision – which overturned Roe v. Wade – added a layer to the OB/GYN shortage that is genuinely new and still accelerating. According to the Commonwealth Fund (October 2024), in the 2024 application cycle, the number of applicants to OB/GYN residency programs in states with abortion bans fell by 6.7% from the prior year. In states maintaining legal access to abortion, applicants increased by 0.4%. When that divergence is measured over multiple years, the pattern becomes harder to dismiss as noise.

Physicians who choose OB/GYN want to practice the full scope of the specialty. Surveys of medical students, residents, and practicing OB/GYNs suggest that access to maternity care could worsen in states with post-Dobbs abortion restrictions. Residents reported uncertainty about completing training milestones in restrictive states, and described experiences of being unable to provide – or being forced to delay – evidence-based care for their patients due to legal constraints.

In Idaho, census data of the OB/GYN workforce found that between August 2022, when the state’s abortion trigger ban took effect, and December 2024, Idaho experienced a net loss of 35% of its OB/GYN workforce. Some left the state entirely, some retired early, and some stopped offering obstetric services altogether. Of all the OB/GYNs who moved out of state, none relocated to states with abortion restrictions comparable to Idaho’s.

In Texas, a survey of OB/GYNs and OB/GYN residents found that 76% believed they could not practice evidence-based medicine in the state. Sixty percent reported fearing legal repercussions from practicing evidence-based medicine, and 44% had thought about or had already changed how or where they practiced as a direct result of Texas’ abortion restrictions.

Roughly half of physicians who complete a residency in a given state go on to practice there. When residents stop applying to states with abortion restrictions, those states are not just losing today’s patients – they are losing the next decade of doctors.

Burnout and the Invisible Attrition

Not every OB/GYN who leaves the workforce does so because of legal pressure. A significant portion are simply exhausted. In a 2025 Medscape survey, nearly 30% of OB/GYNs reported experiencing burnout, and 23% reported experiencing both burnout and depression simultaneously. In that same survey, 40% of OB/GYNs reported that their work-life balance had worsened over the past three years, and 66% said they would accept a pay cut in exchange for improvement.

OB/GYN carries a particular kind of occupational weight. The specialty demands round-the-clock availability for labor and delivery, one of the highest malpractice insurance burdens in all of medicine, and an administrative load that has grown year by year. Add legal uncertainty in states with strict abortion laws – where a doctor can face criminal liability for clinical judgment calls – and the attrition starts to make sense even outside of ideology. It stops being about where a physician stands politically and starts being about whether they can practice medicine without fearing arrest for it.

The physicians who remain are absorbing the patient load of the ones who leave, which accelerates their own burnout. A practice that loses one OB/GYN and doesn’t replace them doesn’t lose one-third of its capacity – it redistributes that capacity onto the remaining providers until something breaks.

What’s Being Proposed and What Actually Works

Researchers and policy advocates have identified a set of realistic responses to the OB/GYN shortage. Expanding residency training capacity is the obvious one, but it is constrained by funding, hospital infrastructure, and the years it takes for a new resident to become a practicing physician. Even if residency slots doubled tomorrow, the shortage would continue to deepen for at least another decade.

A more immediate approach involves integrating advanced-practice clinicians – certified nurse-midwives and women’s health nurse practitioners – into OB/GYN care models, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Telehealth has expanded access to prenatal monitoring, follow-up appointments, and some forms of reproductive healthcare in ways that weren’t possible a decade ago. Neither solution fully replaces an OB/GYN, but both can meaningfully extend care into places that have none.

At the state level, several advocacy efforts focus on incentivizing training in underserved areas through loan forgiveness and rural practice stipends. The evidence on whether these incentives work at scale is mixed, largely because the conditions driving physicians out of certain states are not financial – and money cannot fix a 35% workforce loss driven by legal fear.

Read More: You’re Allowed to Have a Baby After 35

What It Means to Wait

The American healthcare system has a long history of making women wait – for diagnoses, for pain to be taken seriously, for conditions that disproportionately affect female patients to be treated as real medical priorities. The OB/GYN shortage compounds that history and amplifies it. A four-month wait for a gynecology appointment is not a minor scheduling inconvenience. It is a gap in surveillance, a delay in diagnosis, a month of anxiety about something that might or might not be nothing.

The Health Resources and Services Administration projects that by 2037, the United States will meet only 82% of the anticipated demand for OB/GYNs. That projection was made before the full downstream effects of post-Dobbs state policies had played out in the workforce data. The actual number could be worse.

The women who will feel that shortfall most acutely are not the ones with good insurance, flexible jobs, and a car that can cover two hundred miles. They’re the women whose nearest hospital stopped delivering babies two years ago, whose OB/GYN retired and whose replacement never came. They’re the ones already navigating a system that treats access to basic reproductive care as a privilege rather than a baseline, and they’re being asked to wait longer while the pipeline runs dry.

None of this resolves on its own. The forces driving the shortage – an aging physician workforce, constrained residency capacity, legal environments hostile to full-scope OB/GYN practice, and a burnout rate that’s gutting the specialty from the inside – are not going to correct themselves through market pressure alone. What’s already in motion will take years to turn around, and in the meantime, there are millions of women on the other side of a wait that keeps getting longer.

Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.

AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.

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