Australia Practitioner Who Botched Abortion Not Guilty of Medicaid Fraud 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 6, 2007
Sydney, Australia (LifeNews.com) — An Australia abortion practitioner who was convicted of illegally giving a woman a dangerous abortion drug was found not guilty yesterday of 96 counts of Medicare fraud. Suman Sood failed to conduct a medical examination on a woman she gave a dangerous abortion drug to that resulted in a botched abortion.
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.
In charges related to the case, Sood was accused of obtaining Medicare reimbursements for abortions and medical services for which she received payment from her customers.
In April 2005 a jury reached a guilty verdict that worried abortion businesses across the nation who may have been engaging in the same practice, but it was quashed on appeal.
An appeals court found the judge in the case wrongly instructed the jury and ordered a retrial. This retrial ultimately found her not guilty.
During the hearings in the retrial, investigators told the jury they found financial records in trash bins in Sood’s office and said she tried to hide them from officials.
But defense attorneys argued there was no evidence Sood disposed of the records and they maintained she was not aware of Medicare rules preventing her from double billing.
In the botched abortion case, Sood should have faced 10 years in prison for the original charges but went free after getting a bond for good behavior in prison during the trial.
However, the New South Wales court also decided that Sood should not be able to practice medicine for 10 years after ruling she was guilty of medical misconduct.
Following the conviction, Sood voluntarily took her name off the nation’s medical register and will no longer do abortions. She had done more than 10,000 before her conviction.
