Paramedic who killed baby with abortion drug jailed for 10 years

SHAME OF EMERGENCY WORKER

- By Grant McCabe

A PARAMEDIC who secretly gave a pregnant woman an abortion drug, killing her unborn child, has been jailed for 10 and a half years.

Stephen Doohan was told by a judge yesterday his crime was “almost as serious as any this court is ever asked to sentence”.

Doohan concocted the sick plan after the woman told him she was having his baby.

The 33-year-old — a Clinical Team Leader with the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) — was married to someone else.

He crushed pills into a syringe before administering the medication as she lay on a bed at his home in Edinburgh’s upmarket Grange area in 2023.

Doohan gave her more of the drug days later. The woman fell ill, fainting in the shower. She lost the baby.

Doohan pleaded with her not to go to the police and tried to buy her silence with gifts.

But she reported him to the SAS after recorded a conversation of him effectively confessing.

Doohan had previously pleaded guilty to assault, sexual assault and causing the woman to have an abortion.

The court heard Doohan met the woman on holiday in Spain in 2021. He did not say he was married and they remained in contact. In March 2023, the woman discovered she was pregnant with his baby.

By this time, Doohan had temporarily separated from his wife and was living at a flat in Edinburgh.

Days later, Doohan and the woman were involved in consensual sexual activity.

He then went on to do something she could not see, but she was not “suspicious of his actions” at that time.

This was when he used the syringe. The next day the woman began to suffer stomach cramps. He later gave her diazepam for the pain.