OKLAHOMA CITY – Formal charges are pending against a high-profile abortion doctor in the metro.
Now, one of his former patients breaks her silence over what she calls ‘the worst experience of her life.’
Dr. Patel was arrested earlier this week for fraud.
Investigators say he lied to women in order to charge them more for abortions that were, at times, unnecessary.
Unlike the undercover agents Patel falsely identified as pregnant, this woman was pregnant when she went to his office.
She also has a heart condition that was making it a very difficult pregnancy.
She claims Dr. Patel lied to her about how far along she was in order to charge her more money for an abortion.
The 39-year-old woman made the biggest decision of her life a few months ago.
Her heart is enlarged, causing a lot of complications during the first few weeks of her pregnancy.
“I actually felt like I was having a heart attack a lot of the time. I’d gone into the hospital on two other occasions with chest pains,” she said.
She decided to get an abortion and went to see Dr. Naresh Patel at his Warr Acres clinic.
He said he would charge $1,100 for the procedure.
“I went back, and they quickly did this ultrasound and he immediately said ‘You’re two weeks further along than what you’re telling me,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know how that could be,” she said.
She was scared and didn’t know what to do.
“They said, ‘Well, that’s going to be another $500,” she said.
So, she paid them.
“A nurse came into the room and strapped my wrists down to the table. They strapped my ankles down where my feet were, and she held my forehead down to the table,” she said.
She says they didn’t give her any anesthesia and the pain was unbearable.
“I’d never known anything like it in my life. It was like torture,” she said.
Those memories resurfaced when she saw that Patel was arrested.
Prosecutors say he was telling women, including three undercover agents, they were pregnant, even though they weren’t, in order to sell them unnecessary abortion drugs.
Now, he could face time in prison.
“He deserves it,” she says. “I had to have had something bigger than me protecting me in that room that day because physically and emotionally, I never would’ve had the strength to go through something like that.”
Right now, Patel is facing three counts of obtaining money under a false pretense and could face up to three years in prison.
He was also accused back in the 1990s of burning aborted fetuses in a rural field.
He told the State Medical Board at the time that a hospital had barred him from using its incinerator.
He was never charged with a crime.
