Baker spiked pregnant wife’s food with abortion pills
A kosher bakery owner put abortion tablets into his wife’s breakfast to try to make her lose their baby, an English court heard today.
Israeli-born Gil Magira crushed the pills into a sandwich, a bowl of cereal and a yoghurt, the Old Bailey was told.
His wife Anat Abraham was left in pain and bleeding but the child survived unharmed and was born, premature, in June last year.
Magira, wearing a white shirt and blue tie, showed no emotion as he was jailed for three years and nine months by Judge Oliver Sells.
The judge said he sought to cover his tracks by pretending to be his wife and using a credit card in the name of his brother as he searched for the abortion drugs online, which are not available in England.
“You knew the risks in using those drugs without the proper medical conditions being in place,” he said.
“Those risks were serious. There were real risks, both to the mother and to the unborn child.”
Magira then went on to buy the drugs, RU-486 and misoprostol, at “considerable expense”, before putting them in her breakfast.
His wife suffered pain and bleeding and feared she was miscarrying.
The judge said: “All this time you knew the cause and said nothing. The bleeding continued for 10 days and only after you had told your own psychiatrist was the truth slowly revealed.
“It was an act which was a terrible aberration. No one who has heard what occurred can be in any doubt what you were setting out to do.”
Simon Mayo, prosecuting, previously said that Magira was having “constant and compulsive” thoughts about making his wife have an abortion.
Ms Abraham said she was terrified for her life and that of her baby when she realised what her husband had done.
She said: “What made it worse was how desperate and determined he was to try to kill the baby that I already felt moving inside me.”
But Magira, an Orthodox Jew, was described by his barrister Jonathan Goldberg QC as an eccentric “Woody Allen” character who regretted what he had done and now wanted to help look after the child.
His mother Lisa Or also sprang to his defence, claiming her son was a “good boy” and terrified of his dominating wife, who was older than him.
Magira (aged 36) of Langham Court, Holmebrook Drive, Hendon, north London, has admitted a charge of “using an instrument to procure a miscarriage” under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. He is due to be sentenced later today.
The court heard it was the first time such a prosecution has been brought for more than 30 years.
When Magira learnt his wife was pregnant in November 2006 his reaction was to panic and beg her to have an abortion, said Simon Mayo, prosecuting.
When she refused he began to research for abortion medication on the internet and one day the following February, when she was 11 weeks pregnant, put it into a sandwich he made for her.
Ms Abraham, who was 38 at the time, went to work in the bakery they ran together in Stanmore, but began to feel pain and went to hospital.
The baby was still alive however and Magira put the pills in her yoghurt and cereal the next morning.
When this still did not work he confessed to a psychologist what he had done and she urged him to tell his wife, which he did.
“He told her that he was ashamed of himself and he didn’t want to hurt her. She told him that she didn’t want to see him,” said Mr Mayo.
She told him their relationship was over.
Later, the court heard, Ms Abraham, who had a teenage daughter from a previous marriage, received a threatening phone call from him.
He is alleged to have said: “You are all going to suffer, you are all going to die, you are all going to get burnt.”
In May, Magira took an overdose and when he was taken to hospital said that “either he or the child would have to die”.
He was arrested later that month after his wife told police what he had done.
His son, Matan Abraham, was born weighing 2kg on June 20 last year. There was no evidence that his premature birth was linked to the tablets.
The baby’s mother said what her husband had done was “inhuman” and she was shocked when she found out.
“I realised I had lived with a person for 10 years who I don’t really know,” she said in a victim impact statement read to the court.
She attacked “the way he pretended to be upset, the way he continued sharing my bed and my life like nothing ever happened”.
Mr Goldberg told the court his client suffered from depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
He claimed his wife was a “very tough” lady who had effectively “blackmailed” Magira by telling him if he signed over his two bakeries and restaurant she would not go to the police.
“At one stage she said she would have an abortion,” Mr Goldberg said.
He added: “This is a saga with a very unwholesome, unhappy side to it, which reflects no credit at all upon Anat and really revolves around money.
“She dominated him both emotionally and sexually.”
Magira was a “tortured soul” and a “Woody Allen character”, he said, and ashamed of his “sin” in trying to procure an abortion, a practice frowned upon in the Orthodox Jewish community.
In a statement read to the court, his mother, 63, said: “He is naive and a sweet boy who stays at home most of the time.
“He doesn’t smoke or drink, he is considered to be straight and honest. She is different. She dominated him completely, he is frightened of her.”
