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Op-Ed: Pensacola’s Sole Abortion Clinic Lost License Permanently After Being Deemed “Dangerous” to Patients

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File photo: Longfin Media, Shutter Stock, licensed.
Protesters holding signs Abortion Is Healthcare, My Body My Choice, Bans Off Our Bodies, Human rights at a protest rally and demonstration. File photo: Longfin Media, Shutter Stock, licensed.

Folks, this is a disturbing news story. According to a 2023 article in National Review, Northwest Florida’s only abortion clinic in Pensacola has permanently closed months after a pro-life watchdog group uncovered three incidents in which patients had to be hospitalized with serious injuries over a nine-month span. 

Prior, the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration (ACHA) issued an emergency order to suspend American Family Planning’s license in May 2022, after Reprotection, a nonprofit dedicated to catching abortion providers breaking laws and using local authorities to bring them to justice, revealed its findings. 

One patient had an abortion in August 2021 and later “required the repair of uterine perforation, a colon resection, a colostomy, a sigmoidectomy, and a cystoscopy.” The clinic failed to report the complications in accordance with the law,” the article further reported. 

One patient was sent to a hospital where it was discovered that she had a “big hole on the left wall of the uterus and another on the right side” as well as lacerations to her cervix. She had to undergo a complete hysterectomy. 

One patient lost so much blood, she had to be to transported to a hospital.  

The CEO of Reprotection, Missy Martinez-Stone, said in a statement that her nonprofit had investigated the clinic for two years before the order was issued and found that the standard of care there was “nonexistent.” 

“We have utilized every avenue possible to work to protect the health and safety of women from dangerous abortion clinics like this one,” Martinez-Stone said.  

Kudos to Martinez-Stone. How many other women will forego similar botched abortions because the clinic is closed? 

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 Life News.

Really? Where’s the concern and compassion for the three injured women and outrage for the harmful abortion clinic in the state of Florida? With advocates like Weintraub who needs enemies.  

Life News recently reported the following: 

The abortion facility in Pensacola is connected to “notorious abortionist Steven Chase Brigham, who has lost his license to practice medicine in several states.”   

In a 2015 article, Life News reported that Steven Chase Brigham was arrested and charged with murder in 2010 for aborting viable, late-term babies, after police raided his Elkton, Maryland, abortion facility and discovered the “remains of over 30 late-term babies stored in a bloody freezer.” Those charges were later dropped after an expert witness for the prosecution withdrew from the case. 

The 2015 article further reported, “Despite suffering license revocation or surrender in at least six states and his involvement in a number of illegal abortion operations, Brigham continues to run a chain of 17 dangerously shoddy abortion facilities on the east coast and in Florida.” 

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