Australia Abortion Practitioner Convicted On Illegal Abortion Can Still Practice
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 24, 2006
Sydney, Australia (LifeNews.com) — An abortion practitioner in Australia can still do abortions even though she was convicted yesterday on two counts of doing illegal abortions. Meanwhile several new complaints have been filed with officials over the way Suman Sood handled abortions done on other women.
Yesterday, Sood was found guilty of killing a baby boy who died after she gave a woman with a late-term pregnancy a drug which resulted in a botched abortion.
Sood was found guilty on two counts of causing a miscarriage which resulted in the death of the baby. Each charge carries a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Sood will be taken off the nation’s medical register and eventually go to jail, but she will be allowed to do abortions in the meantime until the Medical Tribunal holds a hearing on five new complaints against her next month.
The Medical Board had suspended Sood’s medical license temporarily after the conviction, but her attorneys appealed the suspension to the Australia Supreme Court, which overturned it.
Meanwhile, one of the women who has filed a complaint against Sood spoke with the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.
The woman said Sood treated her in June 2002 even though the abortion practitioner’s medical license was suspended at the time.
Sood, who sometimes does non-abortion medical work, told the woman she had cancer and only two or three months to live. Later, the woman saw a specialist who told her the diagnosis was wrong and that she didn’t have cancer.
Another woman said Sood did an abortion on her but it failed. She returned to Sood’s abortion business to have the abortion completed and Sood charged her for an additional abortion.
The woman told the Herald newspaper she later went to a hospital with severe bleeding and doctors there told her she had fibroids.
Andrew Dix, the head of the medical board, told the newspaper it had not decided whether to try to re-suspend Sood’s medical license before the hearing.
Sood pleaded innocent to the charges in the botched abortion case and was released on bail yesterday. The sentencing hearing is expected to be held on September 11.
In the case on which she was convicted, Sood had given a woman, who was 23 weeks pregnant, both parts of a two-part abortion drug, which was not approved at the time and isn’t supposed to be given to women so late in pregnancy.
According to the charges against her, Sood also failed to perform a medical examination on the woman and failed to ask her the reasons for the abortion, both required by Australian law.
The woman gave birth to a premature baby boy in the toilet in her bathroom at home and by the time paramedics could rush the infant to the hospital, he was dead.
Sood has performed more than 10,000 abortions.
