![]() ![]() The strong scent of air freshener permeates the room. The waiting room on this side of the building has subdued gray walls, plants on small side tables and a flat-screen TV. One leads into the 2,800-square-foot clinic, where patients receive ultrasounds, blood tests and the counseling that the state requires at least 24 hours before an abortion. on a humid morning, patients were already waiting outside the unassuming single-story building for their appointments. When I arrived for the tour just before 9 a.m. In July, I went to see what an abortion facility looks like in the post-HB 2 era. In June, that facility, called the Alamo City Surgery Center, opened in San Antonio’s South Texas Medical Center. ![]() ![]() Providing abortions “was part of my training and is part of providing women’s health.” “We saw this as the only way to ensure we could keep seeing patients and be prepared for when the law was enforced,” he said. Eduardo Aquino, who, until recently ran Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services together on the northwest side of San Antonio, opted to buy a former radiology clinic and convert it into an ambulatory surgical center. Rather than turn women away, Braid and his medical partner Dr. Providers argue the standards are medically unnecessary and don’t make abortion any safer. Under HB 2, abortion facilities must meet ambulatory surgical center standards, which require clinics to have pre-op beds on site. More than half of Texas abortion clinics have closed, in large part because of the surgical center requirement. The choices for abortion providers like Braid were stark: upgrade their clinic, buy an expensive new facility or shut down. In part, the law requires physicians to secure admitting privileges at local hospitals and mandates that abortions be performed at hospital-like ambulatory surgical centers, which must meet strict structural standards and can cost millions of dollars to equip. “The laws that have come about are designed to punish women, to make it harder for them to access” abortion, Braid said.Ĭhief among those is House Bill 2, passed in 2013, which has also led to profound changes in Braid and other doctors’ practices. He’s been around long enough to appreciate how dramatically things have changed in the last few years, as conservative lawmakers have chipped away at abortion access by imposing waiting periods and medically unnecessary sonograms on women. Alan Braid began performing abortions in San Antonio in 1978, just five years after Roe v. ![]()
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