Since she became the medical director of her Dallas-Fort Worth abortion clinic in 2013, Robin Wallace has been trying to recruit more physicians to meet the growing demand. That year, the Texas Legislature passed the sweeping House Bill 2, which shuttered dozens of clinics across the state. State restrictions also make it difficult to find providers who live in Texas. So the clinic has long relied on traveling doctors, piecing together the schedules of one Texas-based physician and seven who fly in from around the country to provide abortions for 150 or so patients each week. That patchwork has dissolved in recent weeks as coronavirus spreads, sending doctors into quarantine and limiting travel.
Right now, just one of the clinic’s remote doctors is able to travel. One of the providers is stuck in California under a shelter-in-place order. Another is quarantined at home after a coworker tested positive for the virus, and yet another is quarantined after a patient tested positive. Wallace, a family physician who left Texas last year and travels back to the clinic for one week each month, says she can’t leave her family while her kids are out of school. For the next three weeks, patient visits that would normally be covered by an additional four doctors will fall to two: the local provider, who at over 60 years old is high-risk for COVID-19, and Wallace’s co-medical director, who flew in last weekend to “hunker down” in the area until early April.
“It’s an incredible burden on the two of them,” Wallace says. “And should either of them need to go into quarantine, or become symptomatic, then we’re really facing having to close the doors.”
