The defence team for pro-life doctor Jacques de Vos, 32 will apply for the matter to be struck permanently from the roll when his much-delayed hearing by a six-member disciplinary committee of the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) reconvenes in Cape Town on Monday.
De Vos has been barred, without a hearing, from practising medicine since July 2017 and charged with unprofessional conduct for allegedly advising a woman that her unborn child was a human being.
Despite the team’s best efforts since 2017 to obtain prescribed documents needed for a fair hearing, the HPCSA has not provided them, says Doctors For Life International (DFL) in a media statement today. De Vos is a member of DFL.
The disciplinary hearing has been set for October 28, 29 and 30 at the Southern Sun Hotel, Newlands. It starts at 10am and is open to the public.
Meanwhile, the deputy president of the ACDP, Wayne Thring MP today accused the HPCSA of violating De Vos’s right to a disciplinary hearing that is lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair as a result of repeated delays, withdrawal of charges, reinstatement of new charges with a new date and year for the alleged offence, and withholding information about the charges which are required by law.
“It appears that Dr De Vos is being punished for his medical view, rooted in science, that “doing good, doing no harm” to the life of a human being includes the lives of unborn children,” said Thring in a member’s statement to the National Assembly.
“The ACDP calls on all political parties to give support to Dr De Vos, and to hold the HPCSA to account, lest you be accused of hypocrisy, believing that ‘all are equal before the law’, except those Christian doctors who hold the scientific medical view that all children are human beings, whether in or out of the womb,” he said.
Watch Wayne Thring address parliament:
We are fully in support of Dr De Vos and the fact that an unborn baby is a living being that the medical profession is compelled to help.
May God work this hearing out for His own purposes – it will not be the first time that an acusation against the truth will backfire on the accusers!
It seems the facts are the greatest inconvenience to the HPCSA.
A fertilized egg in the uterus is a human being in God’s image from the moment of fertilization, and no amount of humanistic flannel will change that.
Stop persecuting Dr De Vos!