Phone messages left Wednesday evening at Brigham's home and clinic in Voorhees were not immediately returned. Nor were phone messages left at the home and office of his Washington lawyer, Richard Westling.
Wednesday's action occurred as Brigham faces a fresh volley of legal problems ranging from regulatory actions in several states to liens from the IRS.
Since 1992, Brigham's medical license has been revoked in Florida and New York, relinquished amid an investigation in Pennsylvania, and suspended for three years in New Jersey, the only state where he is currently permitted to practice medicine.
The New Jersey filing stemmed from an August case reported in The Inquirer on Friday. That case involved a botched abortion on an 18-year-old woman 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.
The teenager "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.
The care that Brigham gave to that patient and others "constituted gross negligence," the New Jersey complaint states.
Brigham has never been licensed in Maryland, and is not authorized in New Jersey to perform abortions after 18 weeks of pregnancy, the complaint says.
Despite that, the complaint alleges, Brigham performed about 50 terminations of pregnancy between January and August 2010 in the Elkton office. Late last month, Brigham was charged with doing late-term abortions in Maryland.
