New Mexico is appealing directly to Texas health care providers in a multi-city campaign urging them to ditch the Lone Star State over abortion restrictions.
As part of a new “Free to Provide” initiative, the New Mexico Department of Health ran full-page ads in five major Texas papers Sunday — including The Dallas Morning News — that featured a letter from New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham referencing Texas’ abortion laws that are among the country’s strictest.
“You took your oath with patients — not politicians — in mind,” Lujan Grisham said in the open letter. “I certainly respect those of you who remain committed to caring for patients in Texas, but I also invite those of you who can no longer tolerate these restrictions to consider practicing next door in New Mexico.”
Texas’ abortion legislation bans the procedure in all cases except to protect the life of the mother. Abortion is legal in New Mexico, which also has a so-called shield law to protect abortion providers from investigations by other states.
More than 14,200 Texans traveled to New Mexico for abortion care in 2023, according to a recent analysis by the Guttmacher Institute. Kansas, the state with the next-highest number of Texas abortion patients, saw over 6,600 in the same year.
Texas patients “far and away” outnumber patients who are coming to New Mexico from other states, New Mexico Department of Health Cabinet Secretary Patrick Allen said in an interview. The state, like most others, is hurting for more physicians across nearly all specialties.
“We think that’s sort of an obvious opportunity. The legal circumstances are pretty dramatic in Texas,” Allen said. “People who live in Texas have maybe got some affinity with living in the Southwest, and so we don’t think it’s a huge leap for them, culturally, to think about New Mexico.”
Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, pushed back at the advertisements in a statement Monday.
“People and businesses vote with their feet, and continually they are choosing to move to Texas more than any other state in the country,” Mahaleris said. “Gov. Lujan Grisham should focus on her state’s rapidly declining population instead of political stunts.”
The campaign, which has cost around $400,000, also ran ads in the Austin-American Statesman, Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Billboards for the initiative popped up around the Texas Medical Center in Houston two weeks ago and will remain up for at least two more weeks, Allen said.
Already, Texas is struggling to recruit medical residents in the wake of the Dobbs decision that undid federal abortion protections. In the 2023-24 application cycle, residency applications fell 16% for Texas OB-GYN programs and 12.6% for family medicine, according to Association of American Medical Colleges data. Applications across all specialties in the state dropped 11.7%.
