“I’m in corporate medical hell.”Īlabama is not a haven for Torres. “Do you want to know where it is?” Marty asked. When Marty called Torres in March 2020 to ask if she would be interested in leaving New Mexico to take on the role of medical director of an abortion clinic in a different state, Torres jumped at the offer. They are a commodity that makes money for the hospital, for the healthcare network, for the insurance company and for the doctor.” “Pregnant women - and I’ll just be cis-normative for a second - are walking dollar signs,” she railed. “If a vaginal delivery pays half of what a C-section is, why would you do a vaginal delivery ever?” she said. The system, as she saw it, did not just prevent doctors from performing a necessary procedure it encouraged them to perform unnecessary ones, such as caesarean sections. She earned enough to pay off her student loans but felt disenchanted. After a year without work, she moved to New Mexico to work at a hospital that did not perform abortions. Unable to find another job in Utah, she sued the Daily Caller for defamation, reaching a settlement in which she got $40,000. Eventually, she was asked to sign a mutual separation agreement due to the death threats being received at the clinic. But the Daily Caller and a string of right-wing outlets posted articles naming Torres. She refers to this incident now as the “tweet that broke my entire life.”Ĭonservative pundit Ben Shapiro shared her tweet, commenting, “This is like a James Bond villain explaining his plan to 007, but a lot less self-aware.” Torres deleted the post and clarified that she meant umbilical cord, not vocal cord. In the 1950s and 1960s, the LAPD’s abortion squad hunted down women getting the procedure and the people performing them. “If we don’t test these things, then they won already … and we’re going to be trapped forever.”Ĭalifornia Horrifying stories of women chased down by the LAPD abortion squad before Roe vs. “Need to be unpregnant?” asks a sticker at eye level of the front desk. Now they’ve adopted a slightly bolder approach, plastering the reception window with stickers offering website links for abortion information. Robin Marty, the clinic’s director of operations, gave everyone firm instructions not to provide callers with information on obtaining abortions out of state or by mail. In July, when the tiny brick clinic reopened with abortions no longer on its list of services, staff members were nervous. You can go to our website, the West Alabama’s Women’s Center, or you can go to the website .” “No ma’am, we do not,” she says gently in her south Georgia drawl. When Tina Collins, the front office manager, picks up the phone - “West Alabama Women’s Center!” - she frequently has to inform callers the clinic no longer provides abortions. Now that doctors who perform the procedure in Alabama risk up to 99 years in prison, Torres finds herself, once again, unable to offer the full spectrum of reproductive medical care she was trained for. Abortion became illegal in Alabama, one of over a dozen states with full bans. The center was one of the busiest abortion clinics in the state, until the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs. It took her seven months to get it back, a legal battle that cost her $115,360.93, according to the price tag she affixed to the framed license hanging in her office at the West Alabama Women’s Center. The 43-year-old OB-GYN - who strides into her clinic most mornings wearing a clitoris pendant and T-shirts with a slogan declaring “ABORT THE PATRIARCHY” - does not consider this conservative Deep South state her home.Ī few weeks after she arrived, the state Board of Medical Examiners revoked her temporary medical license to practice, accusing her of ethical violations.
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