An 83-year old abortion provider in Texas described his experience performing 67 terminations as the clock ticked on the eve of the state’s ban on abortions after six weeks.
Jasbir Ahluwalia, an ob-gyn at Whole Woman’s Health Clinic in Forth Worth, recalled the dramatic shift between working at breakneck speed to treat an influx of patients one night to coming back to see an empty office the next morning on September 1, when the law went into effect.
‘Nobody cared for their own welfare,’ he said in an interview with Vice. ‘The workers—they want to take care of the patients. That was an amazing, amazing attitude I saw for the first time in all these 50 years of practice of medicine . . . They wanted to take care of every patient, bring them in, move and move and move. I saw tremendous, tremendous teamwork that night.’
He added, ‘And it went on by the book. We did not take any shortcuts. Everything was done properly. I was really amazed.’
Jasbir Ahluwalia, 83, performed 67 abortions on August 31 at Whole Woman’s Health Clinic in Forth Worth, pictured above, the night before the state’s ban on abortions after six weeks. A security guard is pictured at the clinic on September 1
He said they treated every patient that came in on August 31, but the clinic was a ghost town once the law went into effect the next day
Since then, however, Ahluwalia has had to turn down a number of patients who are just over six weeks and is seeing significantly less people as a reported 85 percent of abortions in Texas happen after six weeks.
In the 10 days after the law took effect, Melaney Linton, president of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, said clinics in Houston had 63 patients scheduled for an abortion as opposed to the roughly 250 they would usually perform in 10 days.
The Texas law outlaws abortion at the sign of a heartbeat, or around six weeks into a pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The law also deputizes private citizens to report women who get abortions and anyone who helps them to do so, even Uber drivers. Successful plaintiffs are entitled to $10,000 from defendants, though they cannot sue the woman who sought the abortion herself.
Ahluwalia said the patients he does see are coming in during much earlier stages of pregnancy than usual, with some coming in just two days into their pregnancy. But about 40 to 60 percent of his patients are too far along for him to help them.
‘The very few who do qualify, we are very careful,’ he said. ‘We are just totally complying with the law. We look at the sonogram—and we do a vaginal sonogram, not even abdominal, because they’re so much more sensitive, to make sure we don't miss anything. And we do send patients away. We’ve got to stay with the law, whatever it is. So we do reject a lot of patients, and that's very sad.’
He added that a lot of patients are young and don’t have the money to travel out of state for the procedure. ‘They're not able to go anywhere,’ he said. ‘These are the people who are going to suffer.’
‘A 15-, 16-year-old is now forced to carry a pregnancy to term, and they don’t have any resources to go out of state? That’s sad. That is absolutely sad. To me, that looks like the state is committing child abuse.’
