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Honorary Degree for Abortionist Morgentaler Sparks Letter Outlining Ridiculous Choice

LONDON, Ontario, June 6, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The University of Western Ontario’s decision to honour abortionist Henry Morgentaler has sparked an onslaught of letters, petitions and protests – one letter from Ontario lawyer Joseph P. Hamon to UWO VP of communications Ted Garrard, copied to LifeSiteNews.com, makes clear how ridiculous a choice Morgentaler really is.

Take, for example, that in 1998, Morgentaler’s Nova Scotia clinic was ordered by the court to pay $395,000 in damages for failing to properly counsel patients regarding post-abortion dangers – a decision upheld by a court of appeal.

In 1973, Hamon pointed out, a foreign student was admitted to hospital for 6 days after a botched abortion by Morgentaler. She later testified that the pre-abortion interview with Morgentaler consisted primarily about whether she could pay the $150 fee. A disciplinary hearing by the Professional Corporation of Physicians of Quebec ruled later to suspend Morgentaler's medical licence in 1976 for a year. The committee stressed that “the suspension was not only for doing illegal abortions but for doing them badly: for not holding a valid interview before the abortion, for failing almost completely to gather a case history of his client, for failing to perform the necessary pregnancy test or blood test, for not obtaining pathological examination of the ‘tissues’ removed and for failing to follow up the state of health of his patients afterward.” The panel declared that Morgentaler's behaviour reflected “an attitude which is primarily directed to protecting his fees.”

Based on his testimony before the Professional Corporation of Physicians of Quebec that he had committed 7,000 abortions, Morgentaler was ordered to pay $354,799 in unpaid taxes for the years 1969-72. “The disciplinary medical board deplored his practice as one which ‘confers a mercenary character on the doctor-patient relationship,’ and said it was ‘incapable of reconciling [Morgentaler's] behaviour with the humanitarian concern that [he] invoked throughout his defence.’”

In 1985, a Toronto woman claimed that after telling Morgentaler of her last minute decision to keep her baby, he “shoved a sanitary napkin in her mouth and did [the abortion] anyway.”

A call into the UWO media relations office was not returned by press time.

Read more of the same at the “Morgentaler Files” at: http://www.interlife.org/morgentaler/home.html

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