When Politics Drives You From Home: 5 Americans Who Uprooted Their Lives Because of the State of the Nation
Synopsis
How many of us have joked about moving because of politics? These people—from all across the country—actually did it. Read an excerpt from Architectural Digest below.
Moving was the hardest decision I’ve ever made… I’m from the South. I loved where we lived. I thought it was our forever home.
The Abortion Care Provider Who Left Tennessee
Leilah Zahedi-Spung, MD, 37, says she was the only doctor at her Chattanooga, Tennessee, medical practice trained to do abortions in the second trimester (weeks 13 to 27/28 of pregnancy). Patients experiencing miscarriages, including complex cases, were passed to her, and she took pride in her work as a high-risk ob-gyn. “I was on call for the residents all the time,” she says. “This was some of their first exposure to abortion care in that way.”
But soon after she started at the job, the federal right to abortion came under attack. The Supreme Court announced it would consider a Mississippi case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which threatened to strike down the precedent set in Roe v. Wade. It was something about which Dr. Zahedi-Spung “was deeply in denial,” until June of 2022, when the right to abortion was returned to the states. In Tennessee, that meant a near-total ban. “It was the strictest in the country,” she says.
With her life’s work upended, staying in the state made less sense. “I decided I could no longer be in a place where I was going to have to ask myself if someone was sick enough to save their life,” she says. The risk that she could be charged with a felony for providing abortion care hung over her. She had spent the previous few months talking with a former colleague who worked in Colorado, and after landing a new job there, she and her family sold their house and left for Denver in January 2023. Moving “was the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” she says, “even though when I say it out loud, it sounds like a duh decision. But I had moved to that community to take care of that community. It was meaningful to me. I’m from the South. I loved where we lived. I thought this was our forever home.”
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