June 28, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Spain’s “abortion king,” Carlos Morín, has been convicted of eleven counts of performing illegal late-term abortions, and has been sentenced to 18 months in prison, after years of trials that led initially to an acquittal that was overturned by Spain’s Supreme Court.
Morín, a 71-year-old Peru-born gynecologist, is known as the country’s “abortion mogul” or “abortion king” for his former ownership of numerous prosperous abortion clinics that specialized in killing unborn children at the later stages of pregnancy.
Morín’s business turned south, however, following a documentary made by Danish journalists regarding foreigners from Denmark and other countries who used his clinics to evade their countries’ prohibition of late-term abortions. The documentary suggested that Morín and his staff were using fraudulent diagnoses of psychological risk to justify the late-term abortions under Spain’s law.
The Danish journalists also found that Morín had industrial-strength meat grinders in his clinics, presumably for the purpose of grinding up the bodies of the late-term babies he was killing. Morín claimed that they were for disposing of chickens and piglets used to teach surgical techniques to medical students.
As a result of the documentary, the Catalonian pro-life group E-Cristians filed charges against Morín in 2007, and his businesses folded following a police investigation and adverse media coverage. Morín was arrested and jailed for two months, and released only after promising to cease performing abortions. However, he would not be tried for another five years.
In 2012, after numerous legal delays, Morín and eleven associates were tried in Barcelona Provincial Court for performing illegal late-term abortions and other infractions of the country’s abortion law. However, in early 2013 the court acquitted Morín and his associates on all counts. In the process it ignored or dismissed major pieces of evidence presented by the prosecution, including evidence from the Danish documentary, and forged signatures on documents. It also applied Spain’s more recent abortion law retroactively, and claimed that the abortions were justifiable because the women received them voluntarily.
Prosecutors appealed the case to Spain’s Supreme Court, and in November of 2013 the court overturned the acquittals and ordered a retrial, ordering the lower court to examine the evidence it had ignored. The second trial began in March of this year, lasting over a month, and including testimony from over one hundred women.
In addition to Morín’s conviction, an associate, Pascual Javier Ramón Mora, a psychiatrist who helped to forge the false diagnoses necessary to justify late term abortions, was also convicted. All of the other defendants, including Morín’s wife, were acquitted again. Morín and Ramón have the right to appeal the sentence, although no plans have been announced to do so.
Morín was also convicted and sentenced to prison for abortion-related crimes in 1988.