a world upside down

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Aug 08, 2005

The issue surfaces in Sydney.

A doctor accused of inducing a late-term abortion has become the first medical practitioner in NSW to be charged over a termination since 1971. Dr Suman Sood is also believed to be the state's first doctor to be charged with the manslaughter of a foetus.

The Sydney doctor allegedly gave a 20-year-old woman an abortion drug. The woman gave birth to a baby that survived for about three hours.

The abortionist is being prosecuted on baffling technical grounds ("she failed to find out if a continuation [sic!] of the pregnancy would pose a danger to the woman's physical or mental health, or economic and social well-being"), but the manslaughter charge implies a recognition that the life that was lost was a human life. The news story is not very lucid, but it seems to suggest that, in the eye of the law, the abortionist is faulted for not being a conventionally efficient murderess, whence the manslaughter charge is all the more strange.