By Dave Andrusko

What has the ghastly saga of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, charged with eight counts of murder, taught us? The list is as long as your arm—that you can have a bevy of authorities charged with supervising individual doctors and facilities and be unable/unwilling to stop abortionists from running amuck, for starters.

Abortionist Steven Chase Brigham

But what is also gradually coming to the surface is that Gosnell is not, as they say, an outlier—someone who is practically unique. We know that because of the work of reporters such as Marie McCullough of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

McCullough had a story yesterday morning headlined, “Problems with N.J. late-term abortion business similar to Pennsylvania's.” In it she documents just a portion of the career of abortionist Steven Chase Brigham who no authorities seem able to stop.

“Consider that Brigham's latest travails - license suspension in New Jersey and a criminal probe in Maryland - have not halted his abortion enterprise, called American Women's Services,” she writes. “The toll-free phone lines are taking calls for its clinics in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia - and a recent addition, Pensacola, Fla.”

Brigham has a long, long history of injuring women, and losing licenses.

“In 1994, New York authorities took his license in that state for botching two abortions, one begun in Voorhees,” McCullough writes. “ They called him ‘undertrained,’ with ‘submarginal abilities’ and ‘not the slightest recognition of his deficiencies.’ New Jersey prosecuted Brigham for those same cases, plus four more.”

So what happened? “Brigham's appeals ultimately reached an administrative judge who found him ‘sincere’ and ‘credible,’ and reinstated his license.”

As we’ve written previously, sixteen years later Brigham is still at it. In this instance he is charged with starting abortions late in pregnancy in New Jersey and finishing them in Maryland, where the abortion laws are loose to essentially non-existent.

For example, there is the botched abortion of an 18-year-old who was in her 21st week of pregnancy. "Referred to only as 'D.B., she was taken from Brigham's Voorhees clinic to another facility he owns in Elkton, Md., where the surgical procedure was done," according to McCullough, in a story she wrote last year.

"After one of the patients ["D.B."] was critically injured during her surgery there, Brigham put the semiconscious, bleeding woman into the back of a rented Chevrolet Malibu and drove her to a nearby hospital emergency room rather than call an ambulance." The teenager, McCullough wrote, "'suffered a uterine perforation and small bowel injury' that were so severe and life-threatening that she had to be airlifted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A Hopkins doctor later filed a complaint against the abortion provider."

Abortion apologists like to contrast the Gosnells and the Brighams with the “respectable” abortion “providers,” such as Planned Parenthood. But as the last few days have shown conclusively, PPFA affiliates seem quite capable of telling pro-lifers posing as abortion seekers how to skirt abortion laws at the same time they turn a deaf ear when told about blatantly illegal conduct.

According to its 2008-09 annual report, PPFA Parenthood received $363.2 million in government grants and contracts during the year. Its affiliates performed more than 324,000 abortions in 2008--an increase of a whopping 6%.

Your tax dollars at work.