Obstetrician Found Guilty of Infanticide

PHILADELPHIA —  A judge today found an obstetrician guilty of infanticide on grounds that a fetus taken during an abortion on a 13-year-old was alive instead of stillborn as the doctor claimed.

Dr. Joseph Melnick, 66, originally was accused of murder, but that charge was dismissed and replaced with the infanticide charge allowed under the state’s abortion law.

The doctor could be sentenced to a prison term of 3 1/2 to 7 years.

Melnick’s attorney, Richard Sprague, said immediately after the verdict that he will appeal the case “all the way until we get a vindication.” He suggested that his client was the victim of the “frustration raised over the abortion issue” and not the evidence.

Common Pleas Judge Lynne Abraham set a Sept. 19 court date for the motion she expects from Sprague for a new trial, the first step in the appeal process.

Melnick claimed that he was told that his patient was in her fourth month of pregnancy when she was actually in the eighth month. He testified that the baby was stillborn.

Other members of the West Park Hospital medical staff, where the abortion was performed, said they detected a heartbeat and claimed that they saw the baby move and gasp. But other witnesses, however, agreed with Melnick’s diagnosis that the infant was stillborn.

“If Dr. Melnick thought this child was alive, what motivation would he have not to do something?” Sprague said.

Disagreeing, Assistant Dist. Atty. Andrea Foulkes said in her closing argument that Melnick was faced with a viable child, not a dead fetus, and “stalled and stalled and stalled (and) didn’t act until the baby stopped moving.”