AP:
Authorities charged a married man Thursday with slipping his girlfriend an abortion drug that caused her to miscarry twice.NBC:
Manishkumar M. Patel, 34, of Appleton, was charged with seven felonies and two misdemeanors, including attempted first-degree murder of an unborn child, stalking, burglary and two counts of violating a restraining order.
His attorney, Thomas Zoesch, said he expected his client to plead not guilty.
Patel and his girlfriend, 39-year-old family physician Darshana Patel, have a 3-year-old child together, authorities said. They are not related, and he is married to someone else; Patel is a common Indian last name.
Darshana Patel became pregnant two more times but miscarried in December and September, Outagamie County sheriff's Capt. Michael Jobe said.
A week or two before her second miscarriage, Manishkumar Patel bought her a smoothie at an ice cream shop, Sheriff's Sgt. Ryan Carpenter said. Darshana Patel noticed white powder on the rim and, feigning illness, took the drink back to her office.
Suspecting she had been slipped mifespristone, the abortion pill also known as RU-486, Darshana Patel sent a sample of the smoothie to a California lab for analysis, Carpenter said.
When it tested positive for the drug, she approached the sheriff's department Nov. 1. Manishkumar Patel was arrested Wednesday.
Court Commissioner Brian Figy ordered Patel held on $750,000 bail after prosecutor Mark Schroeder said he had a net worth of $400,000 and investigators found evidence he had been looking at flights to Germany.
"The allegations are devious, diabolical and disturbing," Figy said.
A Wisconsin man is facing attempted murder charges after allegedly giving his mistress a drug that caused two miscarriages.
Manish Patel is accused of slipping the drug mifespristone, also known as the abortion pill RU 486, into his girlfriend's drink during two separate pregnancies. The 39-year-old woman, who is a family physician, miscarried both times.
During her second pregnancy she became suspicious of a powder on the rim of a drink Patel bought her.
She had the substance tested and results confirmed it was the abortion drug. She then went to the county sheriff's office.
Investigators said they couldn't find a similar case anywhere in the country.
Patel, a legal immigrant from India, is being held on $750,000 dollars bond.
If convicted under Wisconsin's fetal homicide law he could be sentenced to life in prison.
Patel faces charges of attempted first-degree murder of an unborn child, stalking, burglary and violating a restraining order.
- IF THIS ISN'T MURDER, THEN NOTHING IS MURDER.
- IF THIS IS MURDER, THEN ABORTION IS MURDER. EVEN WHEN DONE BY THE MOTHER.
FROM A 2005 CASE IN TEXAS:
Associated Press
LUFKIN, Texas - In explicit letters written from jail, often signed with "love," 19-year-old Gerardo Flores tells his girlfriend how unworthy of him she is.
"Well, you fat, ugly troll I guess I'll let you go cuz I got tired of writting you and thinking what to put down, so hopefully I'll be especting a letter from you," Flores wrote in one of his handwritten letters to Erica Basoria, whose last name he sometimes spells "Basura," which in Spanish means trash.
Flores was convicted earlier this month on two capital murder charges for stepping on his pregnant girlfriend's stomach and causing the deaths of their unborn twin sons. He was sentenced to life in prison.
After Basoria, now 17, miscarried in May 2004, she signed an affidavit on Flores' behalf claiming she beat herself in the stomach and twice asked Flores to stand on her belly - once two weeks before she miscarried and a second time a week before.
Prosecutors, however, believe Basoria was abused by Flores and never asked him to stand on her growing abdomen nor inflicted any injury on herself.
Angelina County Assistant District Attorney Art Bauereiss says Basoria was just as much the victim of an abusive man as the twins she carried. Basoria was not charged in the twins' deaths.
For some, Flores' conviction has called into question the fairness of Texas' fetal protection law, which gives a fetus legal standing but exempts mothers and health care providers who perform a legal medical procedure.
"It's unfair that a doctor can perform an abortion, a wife can perform an abortion on herself ... (but) the person who helps them can go to prison for the rest of their life," said Flores' attorney Ryan Deaton, who plans to appeal Flores' conviction.
Deaton claims the law, passed in 2003, violates the equal protection clauses of both the U.S. and Texas constitutions.
Others, like Joe Pojman, executive director of the Texas Alliance for Life, which helped craft the fetal protection legislation, say the law is constitutionally sound and working as intended.
"Even the laws that protected babies from abortion before Roe vs. Wade in Texas and elsewhere, in no cases were women prosecuted under the laws," he said. "It was always the third party."
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