A Wisconsin man will be in jail for the next two decades after he was convicted of spiking his pregnant girlfriend’s drink with an abortion pill in an attempt to cause miscarriage.
According to Associated Press, 45-year-old Manishkumar Patel was sentenced in Outagamie County on Tuesday, Oct. 9, to spend 22 years in prison.
This will be will be followed by four years of extended supervision for an attempted first-degree intentional homicide of an unborn child.
Patel was convicted for slipping a drug known to terminate pregnancy into his girlfriend’s smoothie in 2007. The woman, with whom Patel already had another child, did not drink the spiked beverage.
Outagamie County District Attorney Melina Tempelis said in court that the woman instead sent the drink to a California laboratory for testing. Results showed that the drink was positive for the abortion pill RU486, a progesterone blocker that can end a pregnancy at less than 10 weeks.
Tempelis said that the drug is not the morning-after pill. It cannot be prescribed or dispensed by general doctors, nor can it be purchased in pharmacies.
Patel’s girlfriend nonetheless miscarried a week before the result of the lab test came back.
Police who went to Patel’s home with a search warrant discovered an envelope containing the pills. The man reportedly told the investigators that he had a friend in India send him the medication because he did not want to have more children.
Patel was charged but he fled the country, resulting in the forfeiture of $750,000 cash bond. He was on the run for nearly a decade but was finally arrested in New York in January 2017. His cash bond was set at $50 million when he returned to Outagamie County in May 2017.
He said that he traveled to India to see his father, who he claimed was sick at the time.
“I felt this was what I had to do to see my father one last time,” Patel said, according to Fox 11 News. “My father is still alive, but had medical issues.”
Patel explained in court why he wanted the pregnancy terminated. He reasoned that he did not want to have another child because he was afraid that the child would have the same medical problems as his other child with the woman.
“I took a life of an unborn child, I realized that even if the child had some sort of medical problems, he would still have had a life,” Patel said.
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