Calls needed to urge Health Department to enforce closure order

Allentown, PA – An abortionist whose state medical license was surrendered in 1992 has been ordered by the Pennsylvania Department of Health (PDH) to close his four abortion clinics that are currently operating in that state.

Operation Rescue has confirmed that the abortion clinics have indeed snubbed the Health Department order and remain open and taking patients – a move that could endanger the safety of women.

The Department of Health ordered troubled abortionist Steven Chase Brigham to close his clinics that operate under the banner of American Women’s Services. The clinics are located in Allentown, Erie, Pittsburgh, and State College. Even though he has not been licensed in Pennsylvania since 1992, he continues to control the clinics there.

The clinics were ordered to close after Health Department officials determined that they repeatedly and intentionally hired unlicensed abortionists and clinic workers, in violation of Pennsylvania law.

“Brigham isn’t the only abortionist who maintains the practice of hiring unlicensed workers. Based on our research into the shoddy practices of the abortion cartel, few of them actually have the proper staffing with the proper credentials. The practice is epidemic and puts the lives of women in grave danger,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “Brigham is just one who has been caught.”

Currently there is some confusion over whether the PDH can actually close Brigham’s Pennsylvania abortion clinics, and what the next steps are in the event that the order is enforced.

Brigham had transferred ownership of the clinics to an elderly woman in Ohio in order to avoid the closures. However, Robert Torres, Deputy Secretary at the Department of Health ruled that any transfer of permission to run the abortion clinics “would be void.”

A Philadelphia Inquirer story published July 21, 2010, indicated that Brigham, who operates 15 abortion clinics in four states, could be forced to close all of his clinics due to an IRS tax lien for failure to pay payroll taxes totaling $234,536 between 2002 and 2006. Requests for collection of the unpaid taxes have been ignored.

Brigham has been on the wrong side of the law throughout his entire 24-year career. He voluntarily retired his medical license in Pennsylvania while under investigation just six years after graduating from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1986. Since then four other states have barred him from practicing medicine including New York, California, Florida, and Georgia. He served 120 days in jail in 1998 for Medicaid fraud.

Brigham lost his New York license after lacerating the cervix, uterine artery and uterus of a 20-year old patient and taking hours to realize it. The patient eventually suffered an emergency hysterectomy in what the Heath Department described as a ‘life-threatening’ incident in which Brigham did not seem to understand the severity of the situation.

A New Jersey judge ordered Brigham to stop advertising his abortions as “painless” and “safe.”

Even the National Abortion Federation had thrown Brigham under the bus, issuing a statement agreeing with the Pennsylvania order to close his clinics.

“When the NAF won’t have you, you know it’s bad, since the NAF runs some of the nastiest, most dangerous abortion clinics in the country,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. OR’s national headquarters is housed in a building that once served as an NAF-approved abortion clinic. Documentation of the filthy and unsafe conditions that met with NAF approval can be viewed here.

Yet, despite his problems, Brigham continues to operate clinics in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. He holds a current medical license only in New Jersey, where he has also been disciplined.

Operation Rescue is asking the public to urge the PDH to immediately enforce their order and close Brigham’s four Pennsylvania abortion clinics. Please contact the Secretary Pennsylvania Department of Health, Everette James, at 717-787-6436.

Read the PDH Order

Radio commentary reveals that many women are under-informed about pregnancy, and those who receive information are less likely to abort.

By Cheryl Sullenger

There’s a saying that ignorance is bliss, and apparently that is the motto that the abortion cartel lives by. Abortionists in Nebraska and Oklahoma have challenged abortion regulations that were meant to give women as much information as possible and help identify risk factors that may cause women to double-think their abortion decisions.

Laws like these are bad for the abortion business, and a recent conversation with the director of a pregnancy resource center next door to Operation Rescue’s national headquarters supports that assertion.

In fact, what she tells us is shocking.

“Women just don’t know,” the director tells us. Women she sees every day are unaware of the development of the babies inside their wombs. She says that they are surprised to learn that the heart is beating or that their baby in the first trimester has arms and legs, fingers and toes, or that their baby is already a boy or a girl.

Newman has produced a 1-minute radio spot concerning this topic for his “Take a Minute for Life” program that airs regularly on the Bott Radio Network.

Abortionists want women to have as little information as possible because when women discover the truth about their baby and the risk factors that abortion presents to women, they are less likely to get abortions. And that means more money out of the pockets of an abortion cartel that is facing a dwindling demand for their services.

That is particularly true when it comes to pre-abortion ultrasound legislation. Some statistics show that 85 percent of abortion-minded women who view their baby’s image on ultrasound will not go through with the abortion.

“Any industry that loses 85 percent of their business is not going to survive,” said Newman. “They have a vested interest in concealing the truth from women. They prey on those who are not fully informed and are therefore vulnerable. Women’s advocacy groups should be outraged that pregnant women are exploited in this manner.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal group that works to insulate abortionists from having to comply with the law, argued in Oklahoma argued that the legislature voted to “abuse” women by requiring them to view an ultrasound of their baby prior to an abortion.

“It is ludicrous to say that educating women is abuse. This just illustrates how desperate they are to keep women in the dark and easy prey for an abortion cartel that literally banks on women having as little information as possible,” said Newman.

While the abortionists in Nebraska and Oklahoma have won round one concerning their current abortion laws, there is no doubt that the truth will eventually win out.

In fact, Nebraska one abortion law went into effect last week that bans abortions after 21 weeks, when a baby is known to feel pain.

“There is fear and reluctance by abortionists to tackle this law because there is a good possibility they could lose at the Supreme Court level, and that would redefine the way abortion is regulated, and could even erode Roe v. Wade, either partially or completely,” said Newman. “They know that the tide is turning against them and, as a recent New York Times article reported, it startles them.”

America is indeed becoming more pro-life as more information about the pre-born baby and the appalling state of the nation’s abortion mills becomes public. State legislators are starting to get it, and are doing what they can to protect women from abortion exploitation. Eventually the local judiciaries will catch up. And when all women are given free access to the truth, the end of abortion will not be far behind.

Washington, DC — The U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a new report last week that revealed that nearly one billion dollars was allocated to abortion-supporting organizations from 2002-2009 with the lion’s share of the tax money going to Planned Parenthood.

“With all of the accusations of criminal conduct now circulating against Planned Parenthood organizations nationwide, it is unconscionable for the tax payer to be forced to foot this outrageous bill for their questionable activities,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “The vast majority of the American people object to tax funding of abortions. At a time of economic instability in our nation it is fiscally irresponsible and morally repugnant for the U.S. government to pour money down the rat hole that is the unscrupulous and unaccountable abortion cartel.”

One example of abortion abuses is the case of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, which currently faces 107 criminal charges related to illegal late-term abortions and manufacturing evidence to cover it up. Operation Rescue has initiated a campaign to speed that case to trial that has garnered the attention of news organizations. Saturday, WorldNetDaily.com published an article on the subject.

Operation Rescue has worked with legislators who have attempted to defund Planned Parenthood in Kansas. For two years, legislation that would redirect Title X funding away from Planned Parenthood to legitimate health care clinics has passed with large public support, only to be vetoed by a pro-abortion governor out of step with his constituents.

Another Planned Parenthood organization in Iowa is currently under investigation by the Iowa Board of Medicine. That investigation was initiated after Operation Rescue filed a complaint concerning “telemed abortions,” which provide dangerous abortion pills via a remote controlled system over the Internet without a licensed physician on site or even available in the event of complications.

Other Planned Parenthood organizations have been accused of concealing child sex abuse, preying on minorities by targeting their neighborhoods for abortion, and shoddy medical practices that have landed scores of women in the hospital and several in the grave.

Now, Rita Diller the national director of Stop Planned Parenthood (Stopp), has accused Planned Parenthood of “disturbing financial discrepancies” in an editorial published last Friday in the Washington Times. She says that according to Planned Parenthood’s own audits, the abortion group actually received $2.3 billion from government programs, but only spent $657.1 million. She rightly questions where the remaining money went and what Planned Parenthood is hiding by not coming clean in their financial reports.

“America is experiencing a moral awakening as far as abortion is concerned,” said Newman. “In fact the abortion movement is a failing one. Over two-thirds of the nation’s abortion clinics have closed in the past 18 years. The only thing that is allowing this dying industry to stay afloat is the influx of our tax dollars. We simply cannot excuse government funding of abortion either morally or financially as this GAO report so clearly illustrates. We must support efforts to defund the abortion cartel now.”

Read the entire GAO Report (33 pgs.)