Physician Activism

A Texas doctor has revealed that he recently performed an abortion in violation of the state's new controversial law that prohibits nearly all abortions after roughly six weeks into a pregnancy, arguing that he “had a duty of care to this patient.” Alan Braid, a San Antonio-based physician, wrote in an op-ed published by The Washington Post Saturday that on Sept. 6, just five days after the Texas abortion ban went into effect, that he “provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit.” Braid, who began his obstetrics and gynecology residency at a San Antonio hospital in 1972, said that during the year before abortion was recognized as a constitutional right in the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, he saw “three teenagers die from illegal abortions.”