When Fawn Parker moved to Fredericton in 2020, she said she immediately got onto the family doctor waitlist.

She joined hundreds of others in the province already in the queue, and a growing percentage of New Brunswickers who don’t have a family physician they can call their own.

When she became pregnant four years later in November, 2024, she still didn’t have a primary care provider. That became a problem.

Roughly two months into her pregnancy, Parker experienced bleeding, and visited a hospital where she received an ultrasound.

“I asked about what we were seeing on the scan which to me, based on my research, wasn’t measuring up to where I was timeline-wise and he told me that I was just wrong about my timing, it happened all the time, and that we were on the verge of seeing something very positive,” she said.

It would take two more weeks before doctors confirmed what she said she already knew: she was having a miscarriage.

She said she then went to hospitals three times in attempts to access surgery to treat it, but she said she was denied the surgery twice and couldn’t reach someone the third time.

Instead, she took two rounds of misoprostol, sometimes known as one of two abortion pills, prescribed by an emergency room doctor.

“[I felt] just very trapped and claustrophobic. It was, there was pregnancy in me. It wasn’t viable, but I couldn’t seem to get it out,” she said.

After taking the pills, she said she continued to bleed for up to two months before the bleeding intensified.

‘Something had really started to go wrong’

“I woke up one morning and I had a fever of between 103, 104, which was a very bad sign. I went to the hospital, and on my way home from the hospital I started having a seizure in the car,” she said.

She was given antibiotics and recovered, but now she said she lives with long-term impacts.

“One of the big ones was I tried to get pregnant again for over a year and was unsuccessful, so obviously I can’t say that I’m infertile, but medically that meets the criteria for infertility, 12 tries,” she said.

If she had a primary care provider, Parker believes she would have had someone to ask questions to during her pregnancy, and now after.

“I think that was what was really missing was every day I would sort of confront the question of what am I supposed to be doing? Where am I suppose to go to get help,” she said.

Growing family doctor waitlist

She’s one of a growing number of New Brunswickers without a family doctor — according to provincial numbers, 27.5 per cent of the population is not connected to a doctor or nurse practitioner — up from 22.8 per cent in 2025.

An Angus Reid poll found in December 2025, Atlantic Canada had some of the highest percentages of people who report not having family doctors in the country.

New Brunswick’s health minister, John Dornan said in a scrum on Wednesday that he feels bad about Parker’s situation.

“This is the primary purpose of our government, to give people access to care so we don’t hear tales like this,” he said.

‘Easy’ for people to fall through the cracks

Dr. Stephanie Cooper, a high-risk obstetrician and fetal medicine doctor at the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, said miscarriages can be treated three ways: a surgery, what’s commonly known as the abortion pill, or waiting for the body to naturally pass the pregnancy.

But the third option can take months.

Dr. Cooper says people who take the pills need follow up because surgery can sometimes still be required to avoid the risk of infection.

“More and more people are going to these sort of walk-in clinic style medicine where it’s very episodic and you don’t have that continuity,” she said.

“It’s very easy for people if they don’t have that sort of coordinated approach to sort of fall through the cracks.”

And the need for family doctors isn’t just impacting pregnancies.

Fredericton resident Mackenzie Roherty said he’s been waiting 9 years for a family doctor — and that’s become an issue after developing unexplained swelling and sores on the inside of his mouth.

“Every time I would try to talk or eat or something like that, it just kind of flares up. It’s like a giant spike as if I’m like burning my tongue or something like that and then I have to stop,” he said.

“Without having a doctor to kind of suggest possible tests or other things, there’s really no way I can find out what’s wrong.”

As for Parker, she now has PTSD.

She and her husband have stopped trying for children.

“I just can’t imagine having a pregnancy with the healthcare system right now,” she said.