The director of a major Catholic hospital in Warsaw has been fired after he refused to help a woman obtain an abortion for her unborn child, who suffered from severe brain malformations.

According to LifeSiteNews, Dr Bogden Chazan, director of the Holy Family Hospital, was fined 70,000 zlotys (about €17,000) and removed from his position by the Mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, after an inquiry commissioned by the mayor’s office alleged that he not only refused to perform the abortion, but refused to refer the mother to another doctor who would. The inquiry also him accused of having deliberately prolonged a diagnostic procedure in order to prevent the abortion. In order to be legal, the abortion would have had to be carried out before the child was at 25 weeks gestation.

But Professor Chazan’s lawyer, Jerzy Kwa?niewski. said that the action taken against his client has assumed his guilt before the evidence has been presented. He said the hospital did in fact inform the mother about the possibility of abortion. “[At the Holy Family Hospital] patient’s rights were protected adequately and [they] fully implemented the statutory obligation to provide information.”

According to the documentation, he said, the patient’s regular doctor, Dr. Maciej Gawlak, had informed her early in the diagnostic procedures that she could be eligible for abortion under the country’s laws that allow abortion for foetal abnormalities. Kwa?niewski said that the woman expressed no interest in abortion at that time. After their consultation, Reuturs reports that Dr. Chazan sent the woman a letter saying he could not agree to an abortion in his hospital because of a “conflict of conscience,” and instead gave the woman the address of a hospice where, he said, the child could get palliative care once born.

In Poland, abortion is allowed if there is a threat to the mother’s life, if the foetus is seriously ill, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape. Polish law gives doctors some leeway to refuse to carry out an abortion themselves for reasons of conscience, but it requires them to help the patient find alternative options for having a termination.

Dr. Chazan, who has been head of ob-gyn services at Holy Family since 2004 and has served in health programs of the World Health Organization and the Council of Europe, the UN and the Polish Ministry of Health, immediately tweeted when the news broke on Wednesday: “I was dismissed. [But I] do not stop believing in what I do.”

The Sunday Visitor quoted Dr. Chazan. “This decision today is the beginning of the attack on the conscience of doctors and persons holding managerial positions in health care, breaking the consciences of those who follow the rules of natural law, and above all do not agree with killing a man.”

[It will] probably cause the elimination of doctors from management positions – those just following the principles of natural law,” he said.

Dr. Chazan is also a prominent signatory of the Declaration of Faith, a statement signed by 3000 physicians who refuse to participate in abortion or prescribe artificial contraceptives. The signatories represent about 1% of Poland’s 377,000 doctors.

Polish media reports that the woman gave birth to her child, who later died of severe brain malformations. The woman’s lawyer, Martin Dubieniecki, said in a statement that she is seeking compensation for damages. She is now suffering from depression brought on by “the trauma of childbirth, which, with so numerous and severe damages of the [child’s] body, should not have been born,” Dubieniecki said.

Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Warsaw and a medical doctor, said in a statement that he supported Chazan. He said the dismissal was a “dangerous precedent, violating the rights not only of Catholics but of all people.”