In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Eyal Press, a Nation contributor and the son of an OB/GYN who provided abortions, has a harrowing and important story
about the rogue abortionist Steven Brigham, who has owned substandard
clinics all around the country. Brigham has been involved in
horrifically botched surgical abortions as well as a number of medical
abortions that failed because he used methotrexate, a cheaper, less
effective and more dangerous drug than the commonly prescribed
mifepristone. In some cases, he began a procedure in New Jersey and then
had patients driven to Maryland where he would complete it, so as to
circumvent New Jersey law governing late-term abortion. One of his
patients, an 18-year-old African-American girl who was twenty-one weeks
pregnant, had to be airlifted to Johns Hopkins Hospital after her uterus
was perforated and bowel damaged.
There have been complaints and investigations about Brigham going
back to the 1990s, but somehow he continues to operate, moving from one
state to another and opening new clinics when old ones are shut down. On
the surface, his case, like that of gruesome Kermit Gosnell, seems like
evidence for the anti-abortion movement’s contention that abortion
clinics are under-regulated. “The argument about abortion often centers
around the morality of killing the unborn,” writes Jillian Kay Melchior in National Review.
“But Press’s story really hammers home the impact on the vulnerable
women who often find themselves exploited at sketchy abortion clinics.”
Read on...
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