A doctor who slipped his girlfriend the abortion pill in her tea has been sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to fetal homicide.
Sikander Imran of Arlington, Virginia received a 20-year sentence with all but three years suspended, reports Fox5Vegas. He also lost his medical license and could be deported to Pakistan after he serves his prison term.
Brooke Fiske, Imran’s former girlfriend, reportedly asked the judge to grant some leniency to him at the sentencing hearing.
Attorneys for Imran said their client had mental health problems and had threatened suicide.
“To me, the length of time that he serves in prison isn’t what’s important,” Fiske told WJLA. “I think it is really important that people know that if they are dealing with depression before they do something, they should reach out and get help.”
Imran was arrested in May 2017 after Fiske – who was 17 weeks pregnant at the time – was rushed to Virginia Hospital Center with labor contractions.
The two had dated for three years in Rochester, New York, but Imran moved to Arlington for a new job. When Fiske revealed she was pregnant with their child, Imran told her he wanted her to have an abortion.
“He didn’t want to have a baby so he tried to talk me into having an abortion… which I didn’t want to do,” she stated, according to RochesterFirst.com.
When Fiske subsequently traveled to Arlington to discuss with Imran the details of raising their child, he slipped the abortion drug Misoprostol into her tea, causing her to go into labor.
“When I was drinking my tea in the evening I got to the bottom of the cup. There was a gritty substance in there and when I looked at it, I could tell that it was a pill that had been ground up,” she said. “According to the nurse at the hospital it’s 200 milligrams to induce labor. So, he gave me 800.”
Fiske said when she began having contractions Imran began to cry and said he was a horrible person. She described the loss of her baby boy as heartbreaking and devastating, and testified against Imran last June.
“It was very empowering for me to face him and say what he had done…and look him in the face while I said that,” she said.