Morgantaler’s assistant, Dr. Robert Hugh Scott, has been reprimanded by the disciplinary committee of the Quebec Corporation of Physicians as a result of charges arising from an attempted abortion on a woman who was “at least seven months pregnant.” Details of the case were included in a decision handed down by the committee in August 1984, by only recently released, reported the Montreal Gazette (Feb. 4, 1986).
According to the evidence, Scott had started to perform the abortion but stopped when he discovered the pregnancy was so far advanced. The committee ruled that he had committed a serious error in estimating that the woman was 14 weeks pregnant – when in fact she was at least twice that far advanced but it acquitted him on a charge of inadequately evaluating the age of the fetus.
He was reprimanded for wrongly injecting the woman with ergometrine after he stopped the abortion. The committee said he was in “a certain state of panic” and “reacted too quickly,” in administering the drug which “presented a risk for the other and the child.”
After abandoning the abortion attempt, Scott sent the woman to the Royal Victoria Hospital where she gave birth to a 1.2 kilogram baby boy two day later.
