Sometime Friday, the National Abortion Federation removed reference to the Atlantic Women’s Medical Services in Wilmington, DE from their website. Atlantic is the clinic where Philadelphia abortion doctor and accused murderer, Kermit Gosnell, worked one day per week until early last year. For now, the clinic remains in the search cache.
Late Thursday, the NAF issued a statement to me indicating confusion about why the Philadelphia grand jury recommended that the NAF “reassess” the membership of Atlantic. At least six illegal abortions were paid for and began at the Delaware clinic. The Director of the clinic, Leroy Brinkley, failed to produce records relating to three of the clients in question. One of Gosnell’s staff, Lynda Williams, also worked at both clinics and has been charged with murder. An NAF spokesperson told me via email:
NAF has been cooperating with the District Attorney’s office in Philadelphia. We take the Grand Jury Report seriously and we need to understand why they made the recommendation that they did in order to determine how to proceed.
The grand jury report made clear why the recommendation to reassess was made.
We recommend that NAF reassess the membership of Atlantic Women’s Medical Services, the Delaware abortion clinic where Gosnell worked part-time before losing his license in that state. We learned that at least six patients were referred from Atlantic to Gosnell’s clinic in Philadelphia for illegal late-term abortions. These patients paid Atlantic for late-term procedures performed by Gosnell in his Lancaster Avenue clinic.
We heard evidence that Gosnell would insert laminaria in patients in Delaware and then have them come to his Philadelphia office for the abortion procedure itself. The director of Atlantic Women’s Medical Services, Leroy Brinkley, was unconcerned. He did not properly supervise the doctors he hired as “independent contractors” to assure that they were complying with the law. Remarkably, despite Gosnell’s long time association with Atlantic, Brinkley only produced three files for patients seen by Gosnell at Brinkley’s clinic.
Although, the NAF statement implies lack of understanding about why Atlantic should be removed, the clinic is not now showing up on the NAF website via search of clinics in DE. The membership status of Atlantic is not clear.
On Friday, the DE Attorney General, Beau Biden, announced the beginning of an investigation into the Atlantic clinic.