(Bhavik Kumar works as an abortion provider in Texas.Courtesy of Bhavik Kumar)
Nearly every day on his way to work, a young doctor named Bhavik Kumar passes a crowd of demonstrators who protest his life’s work.
The 32-year-old logs more than 3,000 miles a month driving between his home in Austin and one of the three abortion clinics left in San Antonio, Texas.
In the two years since finishing his medical residency, Kumar has performed daily abortion procedures, and fought against an extremely restrictive Texas abortion clinics law that the Supreme Court ultimately overturned last June.
In the next two weeks, Kumar and his colleagues are reopening one of the more than 19 abortion clinics that closed across Texas since the law passed in 2013.
Reproductive rights activists call such laws Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, because they impose strict requirements on abortion clinics and providers.
Amid daily taunts and the Republican-dominated state legislature's moves to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling with new abortion bills, Kumar has chosen to stay and fight for better abortion access in Texas.
"It may not happen in my lifetime, but I'll die trying," Kumar told Business Insider. "I think we all have to try, if not for ourselves then for the generations that come after us because [restricting abortion access] is unjust."
A 2013 University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 16% of Texans think abortion should never be allowed, 30% say only in cases involving incest, rape or when the woman's life is in danger, 13% say only if a need has clearly been established, while 36% think it should be allowed as a "matter of personal choice."
The number supporting abortion is higher nationwide, with 59% of US adults supporting its legality in general.
After growing up in Texas and completing medical school in Lubbock — a town frequently dubbed "the Buckle of the Bible Belt" — Kumar spent two years finishing a medical residency in New York.
But unlike many fellow abortion providers who left Texas for more liberal cities like New York, Portland, or San Francisco, Kumar made the choice to stay and continue administering abortions in his home state.
"I kept seeing folks who were like-minded leave the state and not come back," he said.
A protester once came within four feet of him, Kumar said, screaming that he hoped his hands would fall off and he would die because he performed abortions. But he said verbal attacks like that don't deter him from doing his job, because of the patients he needs to treat.
He has seen women who have tried to induce a miscarriage, women who have driven over 200 miles for treatment, and women who have crossed the US-Mexico border all come seeking abortions at the local clinics in San Antonio.