Grissel Velasco didn’t want more kids.
In 2014, Velasco — 31 years old at the time — was expecting her third child, and was receiving care at Sun City Women’s Health Care in El Paso, owned by OB-GYN and then-El Paso City Council member Dr. Michiel Noe.
With Sun City staff’s guidance, allegedly at Noe’s recommendation, she paid to receive tubal ligation — also known as tube tying — at the same time she delivered her baby boy. Having any more C-section births in the future would be risky, she said she was told.
“They were the ones who read the papers to me, and for that reason I signed to not have children,” Velasco said in Spanish during an interview with KERA News. “I agreed to not having more children.”
But around October 2015, an at-home pregnancy test came out positive. An ultrasound at a New Mexico clinic co