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Abortionist Steven Chase Brigham as he was being arrested for murder in December 2010.abortiondocs.org

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 24, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – One of the “most notorious” abortionists in America, who has a history of license revocations, botched abortions, and medical malpractice, has opened a potentially illegal facility in Washington, D.C., according to local and national pro-life activists.

Steven Chase Brigham is well-known to abortion industry watchers for his legal troubles and role in women's deaths. He's repeatedly had medical licenses revoked and faced criminal charges for operating shady abortion businesses around the country. Brigham famously kept the bodies of 35 aborted babies in a freezer in Maryland. He was charged with murder, but the trial didn't go forward.

The unlicensed abortionist has now opened a facility in D.C.'s Takoma neighborhood, which is in the Northwest quadrant.

“He is relocating after he failed to pay his rent at his Delaware clinic,” DC-based activist Lauren Handy of Mercy Missions told LifeSiteNews. The Delaware abortion facility was forced to close because Brigham owed his landlord $37,708.05, nine months of rent.

Brigham is associated with the abortion conglomerate American Women's Services. Brigham is facing charges in New Jersey for allegedly illegally operating this abortion chain in several states.

Brigham's new abortion facility is called Capital Women's Services, according to the watchdog group Operation Rescue, and it will abort babies up to 24 weeks old.

Handy said it appears Brigham started an LLC called “DC Medical Offices LLC” to make it harder to trace the business back to him.

Handy said she called Brigham's facility and was able to schedule an abortion appointment for June. But, she says, the facility doesn't have a business license or certificate of occupancy, and thus are potentially violating the law by scheduling appointments anyway.

“We are investigating that part of it and it appears that there is no business license to operate,” Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, Church on the Hill DC, and Abortion-Free DC told LifeSiteNews. “How could someone as reckless and dangerous as Steven Brigham be allowed to operate any kind of medical facility anywhere when six times his medical license has been revoked?”

The D.C. facility isn't listed on the flagship American Women's Services website, but “a call to a 202-area code number listed for Capital Women’s Services is redirected to the American Women’s Services central appointment line,” Operation Rescue discovered.

“Steven Brigham is the most despicable abortionist in the country,” Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue and co-founder of the Center for Medical Progress, told LifeSiteNews via email. “Multitudes of women have been killed, maimed and injured in his abortion chop shops.”

Operation Rescue's dossier on Brigham contains 118 items detailing his legal and professional troubles, which have gone on for more than a decade.

The New Yorker wrote an exposé on Brigham that described reports “of plastic instruments being washed with Dial soap and reused” and a patient being advised to “have a shot of rum” when facing emergency complications two weeks after an abortion.

“In 2002, a former employee of Brigham’s sent [abortionist] Boulanger an e-mail in which she described being 'witness to a suction machine accident, in which a second trimester procedure was sprayed all over me and got in my eyes and mouth,'” the article continues.

And a former Brigham employee told the liberal magazine that as a medically untrained 19-year-old, she was “pricking people’s fingers and taking their blood,” “assisting all of the procedures,” and “administering drugs.”

In 2014, the New Jersey state Board of Medical Examiners revoked Brigham's license for killing one woman and injuring another. He was ordered to pay $140,000 in fines and give up the eight abortion centers he was operating in New Jersey. 

In January 1994, Brigham's New York license was revoked and he was sentenced to 120 days in jail for two misdemeanors. As LifeSiteNews has previously reported, Brigham permanently lost his right to practice or own any abortion facility in the state of Pennsylvania in July 2010. So, he transferred ownership of his facilities into his mother's name to evade the law.

“There is not one state in America that will license him as a physician, and although he has been charged with crimes, forced to forfeit his medical licenses, and lost many malpractice lawsuits, he continues to open abortion profit centers through a complicated shell game,” said Newman.

Pro-lifers say that the opening of Brigham's new facility points to a major problem in the nation's capital: a completely unregulated abortion industry.

“Washington, D.C. has the most lax abortion regulations in the nation,” said Mahoney, who's helping organize a Thursday press conference outside Brigham's new office. Mahoney said it will have two purposes: to call “for the immediate closing” of the “potentially illegal clinic” and to announce “a campaign to try to introduce legislation and regulations here in Washington, D.C. to ensure that women are protected, that women are not violated.”

“I think there’s this misconception that back-alley abortions ended when Roe v. Wade was enacted,” continued Mahoney. “That’s simply not true. Just ask the hundreds of families that have lost their children, their mothers, their sisters through 'safe, legal' abortions. The back-alley abortions have just moved to the front and women are being injured, brutalized, dying across the board.”

Lack of abortion industry regulation in the nation's capital makes it a “safe haven for this monster,” said Handy. “This disgraced healthcare provider is not only a danger to women but the Takoma community at large. Action must be taken swiftly to protect our most vulnerable.”

Newman said he often compares Brigham to “the notorious Kermit Gosnell, with whom he had many ties.”

“But honestly Brigham is much worse,” he said, “and if justice were served Brigham would be spending the rest of his life behind bars.”

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