A longtime Texas obstetrician came forward Saturday to publicly reveal that he had defied Texas’ new draconian abortion ban in a bid to test its legality. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Dr. Alan Braid said he’d “provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit” on Sept. 6, days after the law took effect. The law, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on Sept. 1, empowers ordinary citizens to sue anyone they perceive to have “aided and abetted” the procedure or to have performed it. “I acted because I had a duty of care to this patient, as I do for all patients, and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care,” Braid wrote. “I fully understood that there could be legal consequences—but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested.” Braid said he’d seen the horrors of abortion being outlawed firsthand when he had just begun his residency in 1972 and watched “three teenagers die from illegal abortions” in a single year. He felt compelled to act now, he said, because, “For me, it is 1972 all over again.”