"I felt very betrayed and devastated"
Yet abortion pills should be freely available?
A Washington area doctor who put abortion pills in his pregnant girlfriend's drink, causing her to lose the baby, has been sentenced to three years in prison.
Brook Fiske, 37, was almost four months pregnant when Sikander Imran poisoned her tea with four abortion pills. She began suffering contractions and was rushed to hospital where she lost her unborn baby son.
Premeditated killing
Sikander Imran pleaded guilty to fetal homicide in Arlington County, Virginia, after being charged last June with the premeditated killing of a foetus of another and illegally causing abortion or miscarriage. Fetal homicide, a Class 2 felony, is punishable by up to 40 years in prison, but after Ms Fiske asked for leniency, a judge sentenced him to 20 years, with 17 years suspended.He also had his medical license revoked and faces deportation to Pakistan after his release.
Ms Fiske and Mr Imran had been dating on and off for about three years but were living in different states when she discovered she was pregnant.
Tried to coerce into abortion
"He didn't want to have a baby so he tried to talk me into having an abortion... which I didn't want to do," Ms Fiske said.When she was about 17 weeks along, Ms Fiske travelled down to Arlington to meet with Imran so they could discuss how they wanted to raise the child.One night during the visit, she says he poisoned her tea.'"When I was drinking my tea in the evening I got to the bottom of the cup. There was a gritty substance in there and when I looked at it, I could tell that it was a pill that had been ground up," she said.
Betrayal
After she had lost the baby, hospital doctors conducted a blood test and found an excessive amount of the prescription abortion pill Misoprostol in her system. "According to the nurse at the hospital it's 200 milligrams to induce labor. So he gave me 800," she said.
"I felt very betrayed and devastated," she added.
Mr Imran's attorney argued in court that he was mentally unstable, and Ms Fiske asked the judge to show some leniency on those grounds.
Dangers of home abortion and decriminalisation moves
It is not clear how Mr Imran came into possession of the pills, but this case highlights the dangerous uses they can be put to if not strictly regulated.
As Phillipa Taylor explained after the Scottish Government decided to allow the second abortion pill to be taken at home, once self administration is allowed, here is "nothing to stop the abortion pill being taken at other locations...There is nothing to stop it getting into the wrong hands or taken at the wrong gestation." In this case, misoprostol was used much later in pregnancy than is recommended - meaning that as well as causing the death of her child, the pills posed a grave threat to Ms Fiske's life and health.
SPUC has also raised concerns that if the campaign to decriminalise abortion is successful, it would be easier for abusive partners to find abortion pills online and force women into an abortion. Removing abortion from the criminal law could also make it more difficult to deliver justice for women like Ms Fiske, who have suffered abortion at the hands of a partner.
See our legal case against the Scottish Government, and our campaign against decriminalisation.
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