Steven Brigham, 55, the New Jersey-based abortion provider who has been in trouble for much of his two-decade medical career, has been charged by Maryland with murdering viable fetuses found at his secret Elkton, Md., clinic in August 2010, authorities said.
Brigham, of Voorhees, was arrested by Camden County police Wednesday and is in the county jail, police said Friday.
A codefendant, physician Nicola Riley, 46, was arrested in her hometown of Salt Lake City and is in jail there. Both are awaiting extradition hearings, police said.
Maryland is one of 38 states with a law recognizing fetuses that could have survived outside the womb as murder victims, but the 2005 statute has been used only in cases in which a pregnant woman was murdered or assaulted.
Then I read on. This Brigham is a very bad man. He's lost his licence in four states.
Here's the time line of his deeds.
1992: Steven Brigham, a few years out of medical school, voluntarily forfeits his Pennsylvania medical license to end an investigation into his Wyomissing clinic. The landlord had successfully sued him for concealing his plans to perform abortions.
1994: New York state takes Brigham's license for botching late-term abortions, one begun in Voorhees, calling him "undertrained" with "submarginal abilities."
1995: Florida revokes Brigham's license based on New York's action.
1996: New Jersey regulators try to revoke Brigham's license for botching bi-state abortions. An administrative judge reinstates the license.
June 2009: A clinic that will not divulge an address, Grace Medical Care, begins online advertising for "abortions up to 36 weeks." Other abortion providers ask New Jersey regulators to investigate, to no avail.
April 2010: The IRS places $234,536 in liens against Brigham for failing to pay payroll taxes from 2002 to 2006.
Aug. 13, 2010: An 18-year-old New Jersey woman, critically injured during an abortion at a clinic in Elkton, Md., is airlifted to a Baltimore hospital. She subsequently files a complaint with Elkton police.
Aug. 17, 2010: Police raid Brigham's Elkton clinic, where he completed late-term abortions begun in his Voorhees clinic. Online, the business advertised as Grace Medical Care.
Oct. 14, 2010: Brigham loses his only remaining medical license when the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners suspends it, calling Brigham "a clear and imminent danger to the public health."
March 2011: American Women's Services acquires the Pensacola, Fla., abortion clinic where Brigham worked in 1994 as a replacement for a physician murdered by an anti-abortion activist.
July 2011: The Pennsylvania Health Department bans Brigham from having an equity interest in abortion clinics because he keeps employing unlicensed caregivers. The state subsequently approves his mother as the new owner of his Allentown and Pittsburgh clinics.
Dec. 28, 2011: Brigham is arrested and charged by Maryland with multiple counts of murder. He is accused of aborting viable fetuses.
While the man obviously needed to be stopped, could authorities not have shut him down some other way? It looks like some people -- including the director of a legit women's clinic -- did try but charging him with the murder of fetuses sets a very bad precedent putting other good, caring abortion providers at risk.
Like the despicable Kermit Gosnell, this predator may occasion new regulations, new restrictions, new calls for criminalization.
There will be yet more stigmatization of abortion providers, their employees, and their patients. Nut jobs will justify more acts of violence, arson, and murder by citing their crimes.
Oh. Look. The Pensacola clinic that had already been the site of a bombing and two murders was again torched last night.
Scum like Gosnell and Brigham are enabled to continue to prey on vulnerable women just because the Fetus Lobby has so successfully pushed abortion to the margins of medicine and health care.
With our own Fetus Lobby gearing up here, we must be even more vigilant and ready to hit the streets. *sigh* Again.
Happy fucking new year.
4 comments:
BTW, his female colleague sounds like an equally odious greedy exploiter of vulnerable women.
When capital gains trumps health it always ends bad. And that is the moral of the story - not the fact that he provided abortions.
A crook is a crook and always a crook. That is what his scam resume reads.
So true. Had he been doing risky and botched cosmetic surgery without a license say, his clients would have turned him in a long time ago.
Sadly, the Fetus Lobby blaming and shaming of women for exercising their right to choose as well as restricted access to a safe medical or pharmaceutical abortion in the 1st trimester of a pregnancy have created an environment in which crooks like Brigham can prey with impunity.
So...this faux clinic is the epitome of the back alley abortionist all women will be forced to consider should abortion be rendered an illegal medical procedure-AGAIN-.
On the basis of the article, I'm not sure how this fake doctor is any different from de/un-licensed practitioners of other quack medical practises in the US.Hit them in one state and they move on to lies and profit in another. Just the outline of the situation sounds rank with unsterile and unprofessional standards.
What did this quack tell women who came to his clinics that convinced them to go through with procedures at his clinic? Did he present himself as a legal clinic? Did he take advantage of their trust that he was a medical professional? I have to wonder when a woman is verified as being taken from his place and lodges a complaint that echoes attempts by legal clinics to get him out of business.
The charge is 'viable' fetusicide or the legalese equivalent. Aside from everything else, what does the state consider 'viable'? A few of them are pushing it by setting the standard at 'extreme preemie with all the icu infant care possible'.
If they're willing to charge people for 'killing viable babies', were they willing to support a pregnant woman for...
a/delivering a preemie and then letting the state care for it in icu until it's out of crisis? or
b/ supporting a mother carrying a child to term and AFTER or
c/ supporting 'slutty' women who don't want to be pregnant in the first place by putting contraceptives in reach of everyone's income, including emergency contraception?
Presuming the charges are reasonable and the evidence proves the quack guilty of terminating respire-ready fetuses lacking debilitating deformities, were the women seeking abortions fully aware of 'viability'? IE: did they carry forward with a procedure they knew would 'criminally' terminate a pregnancy 'almost there'? I'm sure there are a small minority of extremely desperate women out there that would willingly proceed anyway, just like there are others who would want bullet wounds treated out of the limelight, but the majority of patients are trusting putty in an 'expert's' hands. Doubly so when the 'expert' is a QUACK experienced in manipulating patients.
Why wasn't investigation done earlier on, as agitated for real women's health professionals and his clinic survivors? That's my question.
I can suppose anything from lack of state funds to dismissing 'women's' reports to not wanting to interfere in free enterprise private medical business too much to having been bribed to standing back until someone realized it could be used as a show trial 'Operation Rescue' hasn't masturbated to since Terry Schiavo...but that's only supposition.
It's not like the forced pregnancy lobby cares for facts, given as they are to wholeheartedly regurgitating lies at projectile speed, but I'd like to hear more on this than a newspaper summary. That's with the bias that I'd like to see fakes put of business. Mind, that bias runs to the gosh darn helpful pregnancy crisis centres misrepresenting themselves too. *Those* 'clinics' need to be rubbed in forced pregnancy noses if they intend to use a con-artist harm-doer as the reason all abortions must be outlawed.
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