Indian Girl, 14, To Have Late-Term Abortion After Court Row

Petition for her to be allowed an abortion after the 20-week legal limit was turned down by two regional courts

Gulf News
AFP

Ahmedabad, Gujurat State: A 14-year-old alleged rape victim will undergo a late-term abortion, one of her doctors said on Thursday, days after India’s top court overturned previous rulings barring the girl from the procedure.

The father of the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, claims she became pregnant in February after her doctor injected her with sedatives and then raped her.

His petition for her to be allowed an abortion after the 20-week legal limit was turned down by two regional courts before the Supreme Court on Tuesday gave the go-ahead if medics deemed there was a “serious threat to her life if the child is not aborted”.

M M Prabhakar, one of the doctors appointed to the case, said the girl was not in a fit state to have the baby and the procedure would be carried out on Friday in Ahmedabad, the main city in western Gujurat state.

“The girl is not physically fit and her mental condition is also not stable. She was found to have suicidal tendencies,” Prabhakar, the medical chief of Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, said.

“Therefore it has been decided to abort the foetus.”

The girl’s father took his appeal to New Delhi’s Supreme Court after the Gujurat High Court denied permission for the abortion last week, saying the baby was innocent and “did not ask to be born”.

Police are holding the doctor who allegedly raped the 14 year old in custody.

India Court Refuses Abortion for Teen Rape Victims

Agence France-Presse, Ahmedabad, India
Jakarta Post

An Indian court has denied a 14-year-old girl a late-term abortion after she was allegedly raped by a doctor in the western state of Gujarat, the victim's lawyer said Friday.

The Gujarat High Court on Thursday rejected the petition filed by the father of the girl, saying India's abortion law does not allow termination of pregnancy after 20 weeks, or five months.

The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is more than five months pregnant.

"The father of the victim is a laborer and does not have enough resources to take care of the child to be born... The parents are yet to decide if they want to approach higher forum," the teenager's lawyer, Pradip Bhate, told AFP.

Judge Abhilasha Kumari said it was a "difficult" decision, but added that "whatever be the circumstances in which the child was conceived, whatever the trauma of the young mother, the fact remains that the child is also not to blame for being conceived".

"It did not ask to be born... The child is innocent, just like the victim, its mother," Kumari said.

The father's petition said his daughter became pregnant after she visited a doctor who injected her with sedatives and then raped her in February.

The police subsequently arrested the doctor and he is currently in custody.

In April, the same court denied an abortion to a 24-year-old gang rape victim, who was more than six months pregnant.

The woman later refused to keep the baby, giving custody to the state government of her newborn.

No reason was given as to why the family didn't seek an abortion earlier. Perhaps she didn't know she was pregnant which would be easy enough if she were still a virgin. That, however, would be rare in India.