Following a 7 day Fitness to Practice Hearing, in which Mr Jeremy Lasker was instructed on behalf of the General Medical Council, a Doctor was suspended for a period of 3 months after he was found to have acted dishonestly in falsifying the reasons given to him by a patient who was seeking a termination of her pregnancy.
In giving its reasons the Fitness to Practice Panel said that an abortion was justified under the Abortion Act 1967 because of the fact that statistically it was 18 times safer for the health of the mother to have a pregnancy terminated rather than to proceed with the pregnancy but “…it had given considerable weight to the need to maintain public confidence in the profession and to declare and uphold the proper standards of conduct and behaviour expected of a member of the medical profession and had concluded that those would be undermined if a finding of impairment were not made.”
The doctor was one of a number of medical practitioners who was approached in the course of a Daily Telegraph undercover operation looking into ‘gender based’ terminations. A police investigation resulted in no criminal proceedings being brought against the doctor.