In this week’s issue of the magazine, Eyal Press investigates American Women’s Services, a troubled chain of abortion clinics run by a physician named Steven Brigham. In 2010, after a botched operation sent a young girl to the emergency room with serious injuries, investigators in Maryland discovered that Brigham was performing advanced-gestation abortions at an unlicensed facility in the town of Elkton. The American Women’s Services clinics in Pennsylvania were beset by complaints for more than a decade before regulators finally shut them down, in 2012. Despite having his license revoked in New York and in Florida, Brigham continues to operate numerous clinics in several states.

The existence of such clinics, which cater mostly to low-income women with limited options, is not entirely surprising. As reputable doctors, hospitals, and medical schools have increasingly distanced themselves from abortion, substandard providers have materialized to fill the void. The interactive chart above, based on data from the Guttmacher Institute, shows the number of abortion providers in the United States for various years from 1973 to 2008. After Roe v. Wade, there was a decade of increasing access to care before the start of an ongoing downward trend—since 1982, more than a thousand providers have closed. This decrease has disproportionately affected the South and the Midwest, which in 2008 were home to sixty per cent of the national population but only thirty per cent of the country’s abortion providers.