Abortion hardly has any complications, period.
We’re not revenue generators for hospitals. We don’t bring business to the hospital as abortion providers," Miller said.
Then there’s the provision of the bill that would require abortions to only be performed in facilities that meet the standards of an ambulatory surgical center, or ASC.
Miller has one of the five ASC abortion clinics already up and running in Texas. I took a tour of the San Antonio facility in April. Once we got past the lobby, the facility looked much more like an emergency room than a doctor’s office –including the bright red line that divides the sterile surgical suites from the rest of the center.
“And you see basically an operating room suite that looks like we’re doing brain surgery right. I mean, there’s giant lights on the wall. There’s a big operating room table. There’s a full anesthesia machine. This room is about three or four times the size of a procedure room that would be in an abortion facility," Miller said as we toured one of the clinic surgical suites.
Miller said ASCs, with physical requirements including wide doorways, separate janitors’ closets, and environmental controls that keep rooms cold and blankets warmed to specific temperatures, were created for surgeries.
“Abortion is a procedure. It’s not really a surgery. There’s not any incisions, there’s not any stitches.
The procedure itself takes maybe five or 10 minutes.
So it’s not like an operation that has multiple physicians where the patients knee is open or her belly is open for a sort of more invasive that this sort of ambulatory surgical center was really devised for," Miller said.
And then there’s the cost. Miller said
it would have cost her one and a half million dollars to build the center she leases in San Antonio.
And it took her six years to find an ASC that was about to close its doors so she could come in and lease it.
The facility costs her $40,000 more a month to operate than her other abortion clinics.
She said if the abortion bill becomes law, the cost of upgrading abortion facilities will be too big and the number of clinics in Texas will drop from 42 to 5.
