Florida health authorities officially revoked the license of a Pensacola abortion facility Tuesday after state health authorities said three women nearly died from botched abortions.
The American Family Planning has been closed since May when the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration 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.
The new order from the Division of Administrative Hearings permanently revokes its license and stops anyone with direct or indirect ownership of the abortion facility from ever applying for another abortion license in Florida.
Additionally, health officials fined the abortion facility $343,200, according to the Tampa Free Press.
Initially, the abortion facility appealed its license suspension; however, the two parties reached an agreement and a judge dismissed the case Jan. 6, according to the News Journal.
LifeNews is on GETTR. Please follow us for the latest pro-life news
The abortion facility is connected to notorious abortionist Steven Chase Brigham, who has lost his license to practice medicine in several states. 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.
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 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.
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, according to the pro-life organization’s investigations.
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.
