One of Israel's leading fertility experts and a former chief of gynaecology at one of its largest public hospitals will lose his medical licence for two and a half years after admitting that he removed hundreds of ova from private patients at the Herzliya Medical Centre without permission and without registering the procedures in their medical records.
Zion Ben-Raphael, formerly a department head of the Rabin Medical Centre-Beilinson Campus, will be punished following a ruling by retired Jerusalem District Court president Judge Vardi Zeiler, who is responsible for deciding cases after medical personnel appear before a health ministry disciplinary panel.
The case, which induced the government to alleviate the shortage of donor ova by changing the law to allow women not undergoing fertility treatments themselves to donate ova altruistically, has dragged on for seven years. The process, which never went to court, included a plea bargain with the state attorney's office in which Professor Ben-Raphael admitted guilt. The case was one of the country's most serious involving a gynaecologist.
The 57 year old doctor admitted that between 1996 and 1999 he took hundreds of ova from private patients undergoing fertility treatments—without their permission. He produced extra ripened eggs in some of them by using hormones to overstimulate the women's ovaries, which can be dangerous. In 2000, he was also caught paying $20 000 (£10 400; €15 000) to a man who posed as a policeman in exchange for promises that the criminal file against him would be closed.
Professor Ben-Raphael removed 232 ova from one woman without her permission and used 155 of them for in vitro fertilisation of 33 infertile women. In another case, 53 eggs were surgically removed, and 30 were used.
He took 256 ova from a third patient, and 181 of them were used for fertility treatments in 34 women. Even when women agreed to donate extra eggs, he removed more of them than he said he would. In none of these cases was the taking of eggs recorded in medical files. In total, six women filed police complaints against him.
Ameliorating circumstances cited by Judge Zeiler for the relatively mild punishment included the fact that the doctor had given years of “impressive service” to the Israel Defense Forces (in which he received a medal during a war) and in medicine, and his “warm regard” for patients. He never sold the stolen ova, but did use them to help private patients conceive.
But the judge said that although there was nothing specifically on the law books prohibiting his actions, nevertheless doctors are strictly bound by their code of ethics, which was blatantly violated, and that Professor Ben-Raphael should have shown common sense.
He added that the donors would naturally be distressed to learn that there are children all over the country produced with their eggs without consent.