What bally rot! If Lachlan de Crespigny thinks this will get him our sympathy...

Then he has another think coming.

I missed reading The Age yesterday morning. I saw it this morning. Front page headlines:

"It took over my life": Abortion Case that brought years of pain

Poor Prof. de Crespigny. Here's what he had to say for himself:

If we didn't do it and the woman died we would have potentially been charged with manslaughter.

Let's investigate that claim, shall we?

The Facts (at least acc. to The Age):

• Woman 32 weeks pregnant
• Unborn baby diagnosed with dwarfism
• Woman was "distressed to the point of being suicidal"
• Doctros (incl. Prof. de Cespigny) injected pottassium chloride into the "foetus's" heart, thereby killing it.

The crucial questions are:

1. Was the action taken by the Drs "life-saving"?
2. Could the Drs have been charged with manslaughter had they not carried out the abortion?

If either of these is found to be false, then Prof. de Crespigny's claim on our sympathy is forfeit.

In fact, the answer to both these questions is a resounding NO.

1. The Woman was threatening suicide. She was in danger from herself, not from her unborn child. The doctors chose to act according to the woman's own self-diagnosis, rather than treat her for the psychological and emotional disorder of distress. They failed in their duty of care.
2. The child in the womb was 32 weeks old. It is illegal in Australia to abort a 3rd Trimester pregnancy. Thus, in fact, the law forbade rather than obliged the doctors to act as they did.

Prof. de Crespigny pleads "Not Guilty". The Facts say: "Guilty as charged".

(And in case you want to see just how sympathetic everyone was to his case, have a look at some of the letters to the editor and at Nick Tonti-Filippini's op-ed article in today's edition of The Age.)