A Texas abortionist says the law has made it too difficult for him to keep doing abortions.
Dr. Lester Minto operates an abortion clinic in Harlingen, TX, where he does early abortions, but laments to a local news station the new law, HB2, has made it too hard to continue even that, so he will have to close his clinic and fight in court.
Announcing he would close in 90 days, Minto sounds almost level-headed in this interview with KRGV as he insists that the law has managed only to make abortion access more difficult.
The Texas law, which bans abortion after 20 weeks, which Minto does not do, also requires abortionists to have admitting privileges to a hospital and to do abortions in a surgical facility. For Minto, the nearest facility would be in San Antonio, about 250 miles from Harlingen.
Everything that they have done has not changed the way which we do procedures, has in no way altered that; it’s just made access more difficult.
Minto insists that the law will actually hurt women:
When you prohibit something, it just makes things worse. They’ll be girls going to unlicensed, or not even unlicensed physicians, they’ll be going to partera (midwife) types. Not even good parteras. You know, someone who only saw it done once.
His speculation is good pathos for a story making an abortionist seem like a victim, but it’s purely emotional speculation. The majority of women considering an abortion don’t actually go out to their friends and ask them if they have ever seen a partera do an abortion and wonder if they would maybe play medical experimentation on their bodies. The idea is ludicrous. Yet Minto subtly mentions other ways of self-abortion by claiming that many women will find a medical option.
But now, with the stringent new anti-abortion law that just passed the Texas legislature, he [Minto] worries that the women he serves, those from “deep” Texas and Mexico, will turn in greater numbers to do-it-yourself remedy for an unwanted pregnancy — misoprostol, which goes under the name Cytotec.
The drug, used off-label in medical abortions, is smuggled in by relatives from Mexico to begin a miscarriage — or what Hispanic women call, “bringing your period down,” according to Minto.
“They get things started, then show up in the emergency room and avoid the negative image of having done an abortion,” said Minto.
Minto has made headlines in Texas for his emotional language claiming that abortion is suffering at the hands of Texas legislators. Abortion has not been outlawed in Texas, and the doctor is simply using the political climate to further his cause. But maybe he is right about abortion being in danger. After all, how many babies may have died at his hands who will live if he closes his clinic?
The fact is that Texas’s new abortion laws save lives. For every scare tactic the abortion industry would throw into the mix, the reality is that abortions will be reduced, and the safety of women will increase. That’s good for everyone – except the abortion industry.
