A 33-year-old Scottish paramedic was sentenced to 10 years in prison this week for secretly administering abortion drugs to his mistress, killing their unborn child. He pleaded guilty in May to assault to injury, sexual assault, and procuring an abortion.
The paramedic, Stephen Doohan, was not charged with murder for the killing. In Scotland, slayings of unborn children are not legally recognized as homicide, though there has been an effort in recent years to make the “ending of a partner’s or ex-partner’s pregnancy” a specific offense.
This legal situation differs from that of the rest of the U.K., where someone who kills an unborn child can be charged with “child destruction” — but only if the child was determined to be viable outside the womb.
In this case, Doohan did not want to be held responsible for raising his baby or paying child support, so he injected abortion drugs into his mistress while they were having sex. He then injected a second round of abortion drugs into her when she was on the diazepam he had given her for the painful cramps she was experiencing. The woman didn’t know what had happened until she discovered tablets and a syringe hidden under the mattress, and then researched what the pills were.
Though Doohan was charged with no offenses against his unborn baby, the child’s mother has publicly highlighted the child’s humanity and sought to tie Doohan’s punishment to justice for his or her killing. After Doohan pleaded guilty, she said anonymously, “Today was for you, my angel…. Today, we finally get justice for you. We can now begin to move forward. Not to forget, but to honor you with every step I take.”
While the mother is grieving the loss of her child, others, including the perpetrator’s former employer, the prosecutor, and the media, have reacted to the case by claiming that only the woman was harmed.
Doohan’s former employer went to great lengths to claim that there was only one victim in the case — the unborn baby’s mother. “This is an appalling case, and our thoughts are with the victim,” said the Scottish Ambulance Service. “We recognise the courage it must have taken for her to come forward and speak out.” It added, “We know nothing will change what has happened to the victim.”
The prosecutor, Fiona Kirkby, likewise emphasized her belief that the only person harmed by the crime was the woman. She said, “While offences like this are thankfully rare, I hope this prosecution sends a clear message to all those who seek to inflict sexual harm towards women.” Kirkby called Doohan’s actions “calculated and heinous” and noted that they “caused the loss of the victim’s pregnancy,” which Kirby said “robb[ed] her of plans she had for the future.”
The judge in the case, Craig Turnbull, did acknowledge the child, calling him or her a “baby” at one point, and noted the loss of the “child.”
But in setting forth the harms that resulted from Doohan’s actions, the judge only acknowledged the physical and psychological pain of the mother.
“You have pled guilty to causing your victim to abort,” he explained. “In doing so, you put her through considerable pain over a number of days and have left her facing a lifetime of pain and loss. The effects of what you did to her are eloquently set out in the victim statement provided to the court…. In addition to the physical pain you caused, your actions have caused clearly significant and long-term psychological injury.”
In reporting on the case, the British media was divided over whether to acknowledge the killing of the child or to act like all that had happened was an assault upon a woman.
The Guardian opted for the latter option, writing — quite strangely given the violent reality — that Doohan “tricked a woman into having an abortion.” In the Guardian’s estimation, the only harm perpetrated by Doohan is the psychological pain inflicted on the woman, who is referred to as “his victim.”
The BBC, on the other hand, acknowledged the child and his or her death. In headlining its article on the case, the BBC wrote: “Paramedic jailed for secretly giving woman drug to abort their child.” The BBC further wrote that the abortion drugs resulted in “killing their unborn child.” Of course, had a woman chosen to procure an abortion herself, it’s unlikely that the killing would have been thusly acknowledged, or that the baby would have been referred to as a child.
Conversely to the situation in the U.K., many U.S. states classify the killing of an unborn child as a homicide — outside of the context of a legal abortion, that is. Federal law likewise recognizes unborn children as victims if they are killed or injured during the commission of certain crimes.
Currently, a man in Texas is facing capital murder charges for allegedly putting the abortion-inducing drugs mifepristone and misoprostol in his pregnant mistress’s drink and cookies when they met up at a coffee shop. The baby, who was at six weeks’ gestation, died shortly afterward.
Even in some states that are not particularly conservative, the law will acknowledge a child has been killed when a baby has been murdered in the womb against the wishes of his or her mother. Currently, a man in New Hampshire is charged with the murder of his unborn child, whom he is alleged to have murdered alongside the child’s mother.
In Britain, the need to deny the humanity of the unborn is so entrenched that, in the premeditated killing of a child through secretive means, it is portrayed as though the woman is the sole victim.
At least they get points for logical consistency, seeing as there is no real difference between murdering a child with a mother’s permission and without it.
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