In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a floating abortion clinic sailed in to save the day, providing care in federal waters.
At least, that’s what one man wanted people to believe.
Unfortunately, his hamfisted and awkwardly named operation, Abort Offshore, was most likely a hoax that never produced anything even resembling a floating clinic. But this was not the only pie-in-the-sky plan to innovate abortion care post-Dobbs.
In the first few months after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, unusual ideas to help people access in-person abortion care captured outsized media attention, thanks, perhaps, to the opportunity they provided for an uplifting spin on a deluge of tragic news. But these ideas ranged from ambitious to completely outlandish, and many never got off the ground.
More than two years later, are people really accessing abortion by boat, mobile clinic, or private plane? Rewire News Group revisits the bold abortion care ideas that worked out—and the ones that fell apart.
In one of the most bizarre stories from the immediate Dobbs aftermath, a man named Michael Kimbro launched an organization called Abort Offshore and claimed—only about a month after the Dobbs decision—that he had already provided 34 procedural abortions on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. Less than a month later, he said that number had grown to more than 100, and at other times put the figure at 188 or 242.
Kimbro has no medical background, and even acknowledged in an interview with Austin news station KXAN that he “should not be running any medical facility.” According to Texas licensing records, Kimbro’s wife is a registered nurse, but her level of involvement with the scheme is unclear.
In an interview with Jezebel, Kimbro claimed to have two licensed doctors working for him. But when the Louisiana Illuminator asked for the doctors’ names to verify their licenses, Kimbro declined. He did connect Jezebel with two women who claimed to have been Abort Offshore patients, but their identities couldn’t be verified either. His answers about the clinic’s emergency protocols also left much to be desired.
If all that weren’t suspicious enough, it appears the venture may have been an attempt to sell some kind of docuseries. Kimbro’s IMDb page credits him as the series producer of Abort Offshore, described as “a story about a mysterious abortion boat in federal waters off the coast of Texas within weeks of overturning Roe v. Wade. The series explores its owner’s outrageous Machiavellian maneuvers to restore women’s reproductive rights.”
The IMDb page also lists him as a producer on the documentary film Reversing Roe. However, Kimbro’s name does not appear in the credits, and the film’s actual producers confirmed to RNG that he had no involvement in the project. An archived version of the page from 2022 shows Kimbro was also previously listed as a producer on The Janes, another abortion-related documentary. His name doesn’t appear in the credits of that film, either.
This apparent grift would seem to fit in........