Posted on 02/29/2008 12:29:51 PM PST by NoWayMcCain
A "neurotic" millionaire businessman who had a morbid fear of becoming a father was jailed for almost four years after he tried to kill his unborn child by feeding his wife abortion pills he bought over the internet.
Gil Magira, 36, crushed the pills and put them in a sandwich and yoghurt for breakfast, and offered them to Anat Abraham because he did not want her 11-week pregnancy to continue.
After eating them she fell ill and was taken to hospital - but both she and baby Matan survived, and he was born on 20 June last year.
Today at the Old Bailey, Magira, of Hendon, was jailed for three years and nine months after he admitted unlawfully administering poison to procure a miscarriage.
It was the first time in 40 years a man had been charged with such an offence.
His defence barrister had said Magira was a neurotic "Woody Allen" character and suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder which gave him a series of bizarre habits.
Sentencing him, Judge Oliver Sells said: "You knew the risks in using those drugs without the proper medical conditions being in place."
"Those risks were serious. There were real risks, both to the mother and to the unborn child."
Ms Abraham suffered terrible pain and bleeding after she unwittingly consumed the pills and was rushed to hospital twice.
"All this time you knew the cause and said nothing. The bleeding continued for ten days and only after you had told your own psychiatrist was the truth slowly revealed," added Judge Sells.
"It was an act which was a terrible aberration. No one who has heard what occurred can be in any doubt what you were setting out to do."
In an emotional statement read in court Ms Abraham, 38, said "When I found out Gil had poisoned me I was in shock.
"I would never have thought he had such capability. I had lived with a person for 10 years who I didn't really know.
"The way he had acted seemed almost inhuman. He seemed to be caring, offering me breakfast and looking at me eating it, while he had inserted drugs into it ... he continued sharing my bed and my life like nothing had happened."
She said that when she found out what he had done: "I really felt fear - fear which increased more and more when I started receiving threatening phone calls and text messages [from Magira].
"What made it worse was how determined he seemed to be to get rid of the baby I could feel moving ... Every day that passed I thought I had bought the baby another day to live.
"I feared for my life, I feared for the baby's life and I feared for Gil's life."
Magira sat in the dock with his head bowed waiting for the judge, Mr Recorder Oliver Sells QC, to pass sentence.
Earlier, Simon Mayo, prosecuting, had told how the couple had been married for seven years and ran two bakeries and a restaurant in North London.
"In 2004 they separated over Magira's refusal to have the children his wife wanted. She moved to Israel with her daughter from a previous marriage and Magira stayed in London.
In May 2006, Magira changed his mind and told his wife he wanted a family. She had moved back into his Hendon home, but the reconciliation soon broke down even though Ms Abraham fell pregnant.
When she told him about this, said Mr Mayo, "his reaction was to descend into panic. Magira tried to persuade her to have an abortion but she was adamant she would not."
Magira spent days searching the internet to buy the pills, the court was told. In February last year he made his wife a sandwich a few days after her first ultrasound scan.
Within an hour she had stomach pains and was taken to The Royal Free Hospital. She came back home but the following day, the court heard, Magira gave her yoghurt with her cereal for breakfast and she fell ill again and returned to hospital.
Soon afterwards Magira confessed to a psychologist.
Caught in a moral dilemma over confidentiality, she told him to tell his wife, but all he said was: "I have something to tell you, something you should know, I have done something very bad."
When she found out what it was, she moved out.
Three months later Magira took an overdose of tranquillisers, but when he recovered still insisted on an abortion, Mr Mayo said.
Mr Jonathan Goldberg, QC, defending, explained how Magira had developed strange habits at a young age.
"He has to tie his shoe laces in a certain way or ill health might fall upon his closest family.
"He has to count things in threes.
"At a time when he was still a virgin he believed he had contracted AIDS."
When a series of HIV tests showed his fears were unfounded, Magira convinced himself the doctors were mistaken.
Mr Goldberg said Magira, who refuses to say certain words including "mathematics", was "one of life's great eccentrics".
"At a the time when he was 18 and he had some minor genital operation he convinced himself that a semen sample had been stolen by the hospital and used to impregnate strange women."
Magira even hired a private detective to try and track down the missing sperm and his wife bought him a tee-shirt with the word "nutter" written across it.
He believed he was not "man enough" to father a child and was "unworthy".
His wife was the dominant character in the relationship and had agreed not to have children before they married, the QC said.
Magira had been a virgin before their wedding night and she was more of a mother to him than a wife.
"The root of what happened was, what was plainly a thoroughly destructive relationship between this man and his wife which has thankfully completely and irrevocably over," Mr Goldberg said.
The court heard Magira owns two Kosher bakery shops and a highly successful restaurant called Lemonade in Hendon.
Ms Abraham went to the police and Magira was charged under Section 58 of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act.
He was just exercising his “choice” of not wanting to be a father.
Why do women get all the rights to choose?
Ok, so I’ll go ahead and say it: What about “his” right to choose? He’s in jail for attempted abortion while millions of babies die every year at their mother’s right to choice. tragic sense of right and wrong that the masses have adopted.
In England, the laws are different. Abortion is legal, but it is not as easy to get as in the US.
Also, it is quite disturbing how easy it is to get abortion drugs. There was another case just recently where something like this happened in Sweden I think
Sounds like he should have chosen vasectomy.
That must be why our abortion stats are slightly higher than theirs. I wondered why but if they are harder to get there, then that is obviously the answer.
Why is he going to jail? If the woman did it, it’s just a choice to remove a lump of tissue.
apparently we think alike.
Or wear a raincoat, or “pullout before troops are deployed.”
That’s attempted murder. He might as well pushed her down the stairs to cause a miscarriage.
It can't simultaneously be both a human with rights and a "growth" with no rights.
I also once had a morbid fear of being a father but, believe me, if it had ever happened “accidentally”, I would have tried to be the best father ever!
IMHO, the right to choose comes prior to engaging in the act that results in pregnancy. For one, wear a condom. Two, vasectomy. Once the "cat" is out of the bag, so to speak, and the rights of the pregnant woman supercedes those of the expectant father. Whether right or wrong, that is the way the law is. Society should change it if this is not desirable.
Person B decides to kill person C just because they want to. That’s illegal.
You see, murder isn’t defined by motive, or who the victim is, or what the victim has done. Its decided by who the murderer is.
The real legal principle here is that B committed an assault on A, and C doesn’t matter.
He could have done it while she was away, then said he decided a baby would be OK. She would have never been the wiser, until she drug him to the fertility specialist.
Once you've reached the point that you know you are done with kids, nothing brings more joy and peace to a man's life than the snip.
If C is a separate person, what was the nature of the assault on A? Worse than putting Exlax in someones coffee? Why?
I have got to say, these situations put me in a tough place mentally. I’m against abortion and the killing of babies. I also recognize that babies / kids must eat. I also think that “he should have kept it in his pants” is not really realistic. young people DON’T THINK. and I doubt that can be fixed.
that said, this idea that the woman gets to make all the decisions, and the poor schmuck just has to pay for the next 20 years, while she does whatever she wants (marry him, not marry him, keep it, don’t keep it) just sucks.
Some “Fathers” who WANT visitation don’t get it, and almost ALL of the people paying for kids have little or no control over how the money is spent, if it even goes to the kids.
I don’t know what the answer is, and it’s frustrating. But I see these type of “solutions” being more of a problem in the future if we don’t fix it.
“That’s attempted murder. He might as well pushed her down the stairs to cause a miscarriage.”
What?
So, when a woman puts a pinhole through a condom, and gets pregnant as a result, is it the same as hitting the guy over the head with a candlestick, and then robbing him of sperm with a catheter?
Women apparently have replaced God as the arbiter of Life and Death on Earth it seems, at least as it applies to human beings.
I guess I missed the memo, or got sick that day at Catechism.
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