Jail for man who slipped abortion drugs in bid to try to kill his unborn baby | |
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770 Quote: Jail for man who slipped abortion drugs into wife's sandwiches in bid to try to kill his unborn baby
A husband hid abortion pills in a sandwich and gave it to his wife in a desperate bid to kill their unborn child, a court heard yesterday.
Gil Magira, 36, feigned concern and rushed her to hospital when she started bleeding.
But he tried to finish the job the next day by giving her a second dose of tablets mixed in yoghurt.
However the drugs, bought from an Internet supplier, failed to work.
Anat Abraham, 41, eventually gave birth prematurely to a healthy son, Matan, now eight months old.
Her husband, described by his own defence as a "Woody Allen character" was only caught when he confessed all to a psychologist.
Yesterday, the businessman was jailed for three years and nine months at the Old Bailey after admitting the rare offence of administering a poison with intent to cause miscarriage.
It is believed to be the first such prosecution since abortion was legalised 40 years ago.
Magira, an orthodox Jew from Hendon, North London painted himself as a victim of his "dominant" wife, blaming his behaviour on obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and a belief he was not worthy to be a father.
His defence also referred to him as "one of life's great eccentrics", and described how his obsessions included never using the word "mathematics", only counting in threes, and always tying his shoelaces identically "to protect his family from illness".
The court heard Magira had only had one girlfriend before he met divorcee Mrs Abraham, who has a 15-year-old daughter, Zoe, in Israel in 1997.
The couple, both British citizens, married two years later, and returned to London, where they established bakeries and a restaurant selling kosher food.
They separated in 2004, largely because Magira did not want children.
But Simon Mayo QC, prosecuting, told the court that in May 2006 Magira told his wife he was ready to start a family and they began living together again.
In November of that year, Mrs Abraham told her husband she was pregnant.
"His reaction was panic," Mr Mayo said. "She tried to calm him down, but could not.
"In the weeks that followed, the defendant sought to persuade her to have an abortion.
"She told him she did not want one."
Meanwhile, Magira was secretly scouring the internet for abortion drugs, even using his wife's name to buy them.
When Mrs Abraham showed her husband a scan of their unborn child, he said only: "Oh, it does not even look like a baby".
Then came the day in February last year when Magira prepared a mid-morning sandwich for his wife, then 11 weeks pregnant.
Mr Mayo said: "She then went to work with her husband.
"About an hour later she started to experience abdominal pain and told her husband she wanted to go home."
By that evening, Mrs Abraham was bleeding and asked Magira to take her to hospital.
Told she was not having a miscarriage, she returned home.
Mr Mayo continued: "The next morning, Mrs Abraham was at home with her husband when he gave her a yoghurt with cereal in it for breakfast.
"About an hour later, she started to feel contractions, so returned to hospital with her husband, who appeared very tense."
Again a doctor told them miscarriage had not occurred.
The bleeding and pain - which lingered for two weeks - initially remained a mystery.
Shortly afterwards, Magira sought an urgent appointment with psychologist Limor Abramov in which he confessed to putting abortion drugs in his wife's food.
Mrs Abramov spent several days consulting colleagues before encouraging Magira to tell his wife what he had done.
Almost a week on, he telephoned Mrs Abraham and told her: "I have done something very bad."
He refused to be specific, but gave her his psychologist's phone number. Only then did she discover the truth and the police were alerted.
Yesterday, in a statement to the court, Mrs Abraham said: "When I found out Gil had poisoned me, I was in deep shock.
"I have lived with a person for ten years I don't really know. The way it was done seems almost inhuman.
"The way he was pretending to be caring and offering me breakfast, looking at me eating it, fully aware he had just inserted drugs into my food.
"The way he was pretending to be upset like me while I was bleeding, the way he repeated the same act the following morning, and the way he continued sharing my bed and my life like nothing ever happened.
"What made it worse was seeing how determined he was to get rid of the baby that I already felt moving."
Jonathan Goldberg QC, defending, said in mitigation that Magira was mentally ill.
Mrs Abraham, meanwhile, was a "very tough lady indeed", who had once bought him a T-shirt bearing the word "nutter", he said.
Mr Goldberg said Magira realised he had sinned against his religion by seeking an abortion and suggested he would hope to gain access to his son once released from prison.
| 'Yesterday, the businessman was jailed for three years and nine months at the Old Bailey after admitting the rare offence of administering a poison with intent to cause miscarriage.
It is believed to be the first such prosecution since abortion was legalised 40 years ago.'
So he gets thrown in prison for unsuccessfully attempting to kill their baby, even though if his wife had decided to kill their unborn baby via an abortion, and had gone through with it, she obviously wouldn't have been punished - she wouldn't have even been up in court......because a life is only a life if the woman decides it is.
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29th-February-2008
