U.S. — A 2023 peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law reported that women's health providers increased their political engagement through the Vot-ER program following the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court's draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The study, titled "Abortion Politics: Physician Mobilization in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision," found a 4.8 to 6.7 percentage-point increase in the share of Vot-ER badge orders from women's health providers immediately after the draft opinion became public. Women's health providers' participation in Vot-ER increased from approximately 10% of physician participants in 2020 to over 15% in 2022.

Hilary Izatt, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University and a co-author of the study, stated, "Healthcare is already connected to democratic participation because policy decisions shape patients' lives and providers' work. Dobbs simply made that connection especially visible." The research utilized a dataset of 6,205 physicians involved with Vot-ER, a healthcare-based get-out-the-vote campaign, comparing women's health providers to other medical professionals within the program.

"Physicians who joined Vot-ER were already civically engaged, making it more difficult-not easier-to detect differences between groups," Izatt said. "Yet even within this highly engaged population, women's health providers became more politically active after Dobbs."

In the 2022 midterm election, about 6.4% of women's health providers voted, compared to approximately 5.7% of other providers. Among Democratic physicians, women's health providers were 6.3% more likely to vote than physicians who specialized in other areas. The study also determined that the difference in mobilization between female and male women's health providers was not statistically significant.

Kelly Hunter of Northwestern University, Michael E. Shepherd of the University of Michigan, Eve Bryner of American University, and Alister Martin of Harvard Medical School also co-authored the study. Izatt described the study's analytical method: "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."