'I should not be running any medical facility': Man offering abortions at sea for Texas women

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/i-should-not-be-running-any-medical-facility-man-offering-abortions-at-sea-for-texas-women/

‘I should not be running any medical facility’: Man offering abortions at sea for Texas women
by: Jala Washington
Posted: Aug 25, 2022 / 05:12 PM CDT

GALVESTON, Texas (Nexstar) — With most abortions officially being illegal in Texas as of Thursday, women are looking for options, and some are turning to ‘Abort Offshore.’ It’s a for-profit organization that is taking women out on boats from the Galveston area into federal water to have abortions.

A man named Michael Kimbro said he launched ‘Abort Offshore’ in mid-July. He said he has family in Texas but lives in New York — going back and forth between the two states.

Kimbro has no medical experience, he confirmed. But he said he decided to create the business after the leak of the Supreme Court opinion that overturned the Roe v. Wade precedent.

“No, I should not be running any sort of medical facility,” Kimbro said.

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https://jezebel.com/this-abortion-boat-sounds-fishy-1849420727

This Abortion Boat Sounds Fishy
How did a man with no experience in abortion care launch a service for offshore procedures, just weeks after the fall of Roe v. Wade?
By Susan Rinkunas
8/17/22 12:35PM

In the two dystopian months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights supporters have been desperate for any positive news on the abortion front. Stories are pouring out by the day of pregnant people forced into unimaginable situations. So when a mysterious abortion boat appeared out of nowhere off the coast of Texas in July, claiming to have already provided dozens of abortions in federal waters, a lot of people needed it to be a hero.

That boat, run by a for-profit company called Abort Offshore, claimed it could offer abortions up to 20 weeks in the Gulf of Mexico, immune to state laws. And it started doing so, apparently, at a rapid clip: On July 23, Abort Offshore announced that it had done 34 abortions as a test. By August 3, it claimed to have provided more than 100 procedures. And just 10 days later, the company tweeted that it had performed nearly 200 legal abortions for women from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Abortion advocates and providers, meanwhile, weren’t convinced. Abort Offshore’s website demands a cash payment in full — $1,500 to $2,200, depending on gestation — just to secure an appointment. And more concerningly, it’s quite difficult to establish a legitimate, medically sound abortion clinic on a boat in such a short amount of time. OB-GYN Meg Autry announced just a week before Abort Offshore entered the scene that she’d been working on plans to launch a similar boat to serve Gulf Coast patients — and she is still trying to raise the $20 million she needs to cover the vessel, security, liability insurance, patient care, etc; before she can even begin.

So how did someone launch a full abortion boat within weeks, and why had virtually no one in the field heard of him before?