Doctor says political mayhem in the U.S. pushed her to come home to New Brunswick

Dr. Sophia Halassy couldn't be happier. The 32-year old bilingual obstetrician-gynecologist is settling into a new job at the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton, helping to tackle a years-long waiting list of patients. 

This is a homecoming for Halassy, her husband and their two young daughters. After more than a decade of medical school, residency and employment in the United States, she was eager to get her family back on Canadian soil.

While Halassy had long harboured hopes of returning to her native New Brunswick, it was the swing to the political right in the U.S. that provided the final push, she said. The reversal of the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion in the U.S., was a turning point for her.

"That was in 2022,  and I know the time exactly because I just had my daughter. And I think at that point it was very scary," she said, referring to the future of women's reproductive rights in the United States.

Those fears continued to grow with the Trump administration's drive to root out what it perceives to be liberal bias in medical research, which has led to the firing of trained health-care workers, medical technicians and researchers. 

Many others are leaving in frustration because of what they consider to be an anti-science agenda championed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.

Cuts to funding for Medicaid, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health are pushing more physicians like Halassy back across the border.  

"I felt safe where we were [in New York], but I don't think that will stand for other parts of the country unfortunately," she said.

"We're very humbled to be back in a place that feels a bit more safe in that department."

Amid a flurry of medical migration from the U.S., physician-poor provinces such as New Brunswick are scrambling to welcome doctors from south of the border. 

Sean Hatchard, spokesperson for the Department of Health, said in a statement that the province has been "actively recruiting in the United States, especially for hard-to-fill physician specialist positions."

As of March 1, 2025, there were 389 full-time equivalent physician positions vacant in New Brunswick — 192 in family medicine and another 197 for other specialties.

In obstetrics and gynecology, just two vacant positions are listed on the government website, one in Bathurst and another in Moncton, and Halasssy said that's not enough.

Even for an experienced obstetrician-gynecologist like Halassy, it took years to find a position in New Brunswick. And when her current job did come up, there were no guarantees.