When Gil Magira found out that his wife of two years, Anat Abraham, was expecting their first child, he is alleged to have become quite agitated about it and encouraged her to abort the child. When Anat refused, Gil proceeded to scour the Internet in search of abortion pills that he could secretly give his wife in her food. His hope was that she would miscarry and never realize that he had been the culprit.
Things did not turn out the way he wanted them to and now Margira will spend the next three years in prison. In the meantime Anat has a handsome son who was born healthy and is now thriving. She has described her husband’s actions as cruel and said that nobody, “can imagine how wonderful it feels to hold my son. I know how close I got to never having him.”
This story is not unique in the annals of twenty-first century life, but it is sobering when one considers the depths to which some people will plunge in their effort to rid their lives of people they find inconvenient or burdensome.
In this situation we have a wealthy businessman who could provide all the worldly goods ever imagined to his child and yet he despised the very idea of being a father and worked hard to see to it that his preborn son died prior to birth. It sounds so animalistic, so outrageous, so insane that it’s hard to put one’s mind around the idea.
And yet, to be perfectly honest, this case is but one among many that occur each day. Most of them go unnoticed and unreported, but when such a macabre occurrence does come to our attention, it should inspire us to do more to protect the preborn, affirm the family and teach our fellow human beings about what it means to respect others regardless of their age or condition of dependency.
Mr. Magira and fathers like him need our prayers. They also need to be behind bars.