Sep 8, 2010 / 00:42 am
A four-state abortion business is under investigation after an abortionist allegedly critically injured a woman during an abortion and used a private car rather than an ambulance to take her to a hospital. The business has a habit of moving late-term patients across state lines. Police also removed 35 late-term fetuses or their parts from one facility.
Steven Brigham, 54, would initiate abortion procedures at his Voorhees, New Jersey abortion clinic and then lead a caravan to his facility in Elkton, Maryland to continue the abortions. When one 18-year-old woman suffered a critical uterine perforation during surgery at the Elkton branch, the bleeding, semiconscious woman was put into the back of a rented Chevrolet Malibu and driven to a nearby hospital emergency room, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
According to medical board documents, Brigham and the responsible abortionist Nicola Riley originally contemplated taking the patient by wheelchair to the hospital about two blocks away. The two abortionists reportedly dodged questions “about who they were, what had happened, and from where they had come.”
The patient’s injuries were so complicated that she had to be flown by helicopter to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Riley “returned to the Elkton office … to perform another abortion,” the documents report.
The Maryland Board of Physicians and Elkton police are investigating Brigham’s abortion business, American Women’s Services, which has clinics in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia.
On Aug. 25 the Maryland Board of Physicians ordered Brigham to stop performing abortions in its state, where he has never been licensed to practice medicine, the Associated Press reports. The Board also suspended the licenses of Riley and George Shepard Jr., who ordered medication for AWS’ Maryland facilities and took part in the arrangement of starting abortions in one state and having patients drive across state lines to complete the killing procedure.
Police who raided the Elkton facility removed 35 “late-term fetuses and fetal parts.” The remains were frozen and records showed fetal ages of up to 36 weeks, two weeks short of full-term.
The police also raided the Voorhees, N.J. headquarters of the 15-clinic abortion chain.