Australia Abortion Practitioner Will Stop Doing Abortions After Conviction 
Email this article
Printer friendly page
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 30, 2006
Sydney, Australia (LifeNews.com) — Australia abortion practitioner Suman Sood, who has done more than 10,000 abortions in her career, is calling it quits. Her decision comes after she was convicted by a court for illegally giving a woman an abortion drug late in pregnancy and not conducting a proper pre-abortion examination on her.
Sood is withdrawing her name from the New South Wales Register of Medical Practitioners, the list of doctors allowed to practice in the southeastern Australian state. The move becomes effective on Wednesday.
Sood was found guilty on two counts of causing a miscarriage which resulted in the death of a baby boy. She faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and sentencing will begin on September 15.
Sood released a statement, according to The Advertiser newspaper saying she had voluntarily withdrawn her name and apologizing to patients who may be inconvenienced.
The abortion practitioner also claimed her court case had resulted in a "media frenzy" and alleged that her patients "have been disturbed by the media coverage which contained inaccuracies and distorted accounts of my treatment of some patients."
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.
Sood would have eventually been taken off the medical register before going to jail, but her decision to remove herself means she will not be able to do abortions before she is imprisoned.
Her decision also comes after several new complaints have been filed with officials over the way Suman Sood handled abortions done on other women.
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.
Sood faces hearings before the NSW Medical Tribunal next month on the various complaints.
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.
