A Florida abortion facility has closed permanently after state health authorities said three women nearly died when its abortionist seriously injured them in botched abortions.
Pensacola News Journal reports American Family Planning in Pensacola agreed to give up its license and close this month in a legal dispute with the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration.
The abortion facility has not been aborting unborn babies since last May when the agency suspended its license for “endangering the health, safety and welfare” of its patients. State health officials said the abortion facility had hundreds of safety violations, the worst involving nearly killing three women in botched abortions within a span of nine months.
Initially, the abortion facility appealed the suspension, and a hearing was scheduled for later this month; however, the two parties reached an agreement and a judge dismissed the case Jan. 6, according to the News Journal.
The abortion facility is connected to notorious abortionist Steven Chase Brigham, who has lost his license to practice medicine in several states. Pro-life advocates with Operation Rescue reported seeing Brigham at the facility as recently as May 2020. It is not clear if Brigham was the one who performed the three recent botched abortions.
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Within a nine-month period, state health officials said three women nearly died from abortion complications at the facility: one required resuscitation, another had parts of her colon removed and a third needed an emergency hysterectomy, the News Journal reported last year.
The three women’s cases are disturbing. State health officials said one woman had to be hospitalized in August 2021 and had parts of her colon removed after her uterus was perforated in a botched abortion. Another woman was found with “pools of blood on the floor” around her, according to their investigation.
In the case of the third woman, the abortion facility failed to monitor her vital signs when it gave her drugs and then told her to wait in her car until the abortion procedure, according to the state health officials. Mid-abortion, the abortionist lacerated her cervix and possibly ruptured her uterus and had to stop the procedure, the report continues.
Rather than take her to the local hospital in Pensacola, the abortion staff told the woman’s husband to drive to a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, the health officials found. At the Mobile hospital, the woman had to be resuscitated after emergency room doctors found that she did not have a pulse, the state report continues. She also received a blood transfusion to “replace egregious blood loss,” according to the state health officials.
The Florida health agency also reported hundreds of other violations, including failing to document patients’ consent or follow the 24-hour waiting period.
In May 2022, the pro-life investigative group Reprotection spearheaded the investigation that led to the emergency suspension of the facility’s license.
“The standard of care at the American Family Planning Abortion Clinic was non-existent and we are elated the clinic has shut down before more women are seriously harmed,” said Missy Martinez-Stone, CEO of Reprotection.
Despite the abortion facility’s horrible record, local abortion activists in Pensacola lamented the news about its closure.
“It has felt like a regression for us, for women, for people who need access to abortions,” Amy Weintraub, reproductive rights program director at Progress Florida, told the newspaper.
A new pro-abortion group, the Pensacola Abortion Rights Taskforce, is trying to find another abortionist willing to open a facility in the city, according to the report.
The American Family Planning of Pensacola has a record of botched abortions and criminal activity by its abortionists, according to Operation Rescue. One abortionist, Candace Sue Cooley, was arrested for driving under the influence and charged with child abuse, and others who work for Brigham’s abortion chain are known sex offenders and drug abusers, the pro-life organization found.
Operation Rescue reports more:
Brigham … once employed an abortionist who was caught on video attacking his pregnant girlfriend in order to force her to get an abortion she did not want.
Other abortionists that have been on Brigham’s payroll at one time or another are no better. Two were convicted drug violators, one abortionist was guilty of billing fraud, and another was a convicted income tax cheat who once paid out $3.5 million in a malpractice suit.
Brigham himself has 30 years of deceptive and illegal practices under his belt that have cost him six medical licenses in six states. He was once arrested for the murder of over 30 late-term babies discovered stacked in a bloody freezer during a police raid, although the charges were later dropped. The State of Pennsylvania even once ordered him never to operate an abortion business in that state again – an order he has never fully obeyed.
