Sometimes I despair of the courts in this country. Surely they could have sorted out required meds etc.
The case of a woman whose baby daughter was forcibly removed from her womb by social services was described by human-rights groups on Sunday night as “the stuff of nightmares”. The Italian woman was sedated and her baby delivered against her will, after Essex social services obtained a court order in August 2012 for the birth “to be enforced by way of caesarean section”.
The case, described by the woman’s lawyers as “unprecedented”, has further highlighted the controversial decisions made by the Court of Protection, which authorised the forced removal of the baby, as well as the powers afforded to social workers.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was visiting Britain in July last year to attend a Ryanair training course at Stansted airport in Essex when she suffered a panic attack after failing to take medication for her bipolar disorder.
Despite the woman’s mother explaining her daughter’s condition to police over the telephone from Italy, she was taken to a psychiatric hospital and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Five weeks later, her daughter was removed from her womb without her consent.
John Hemming MP, who is campaigning for greater openness in the family courts, is set to raise the issue in Parliament this week and said he hoped the incident would “shock people out of their complacency about the corrupt practices in the family court”. He told The Independent: “I think this has a fair chance of being the worst case of human-rights abuse I’ve ever seen. She wasn’t treated as a human being.”
After the C-section, the woman, who has two other children and is divorced, was sent back to Italy without her daughter. She returned to Britain in February to request the return of her daughter, who is now 15 months old, but was told at Chelmsford Crown Court that she was to be put up for adoption in case her mother suffered a relapse.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: “At first blush this is dystopian science-fiction unworthy of a democracy like ours. Forced surgery and separation of mother and infant is the stuff of nightmares.”
A spokesman for Essex County Council said he could not comment on ongoing cases.
Comments
Christopher Booker broke the story.
All I would add, whilst noting Stilladdicted's observation, is that if Christopher Booker and Shami are both in agreement then there is a very high probability something untoward has occurred particularly when you add John Hemming's, a Lib Dem, comments into the mix too.
EDIT: Click on the image to enlarge.
A proper source.
The woman managed to have kids without harming them in her past.
She came to this country to attend a Ryanair conference. Doesn't imply someone to mad to work.
She is Italian so why hasn't Essex blablabla tried to return the child to Italy and allow the mother to attempt to claim back the child via the Italian courts.
At all levels this seems wrong.
simple
instead we sedate her cut her baby out of her stomach and then send her home , come on folks it aint a movie this is real life
that's disgusting
The woman concerned may have been fit to fly in July, but we've no idea how her condition deteriorated between then and August, when the caesarean took place. (Also, she may have been fit to work before she arrived, but we don't know how long she'd been off her meds). She may have been suffering from pre-eclampsia, had a placental abruption or one of a number of other conditions that meant an emergency C-section was needed for the sake of her own health, but was unable to give informed consent due to her mental state, so the NHS applied for a court order to be allowed to do one.
Once the baby had been delivered it'd have to go into foster care while she was still sectioned. I can understand the concern about the speed with which it appears to have been put out for adoption, but as I say we don't know the full story. It's another case of social workers being damned if they do, and damned if they don't. If they'd returned the child to her once she'd left hospital, and she'd killed the child a short time later in a bout of postpartum psychosis, the very same papers that are saying how unjust this is would be screaming for the social workers' heads and asking how she'd ever been allowed custody
And the decison left to them using their own services and medical decisions
It astounds me that baby P etc can go through this system being failed by gp,s social services, teachers and every other overworked person so we are told yet this woman has had her child snatched
In a heart beat
The judge has asked those that made the decision to come to him and explain it
Will make good listening
The thought of this poor baby being whiped out of its womb is disturbing to me
If the child was already born and taken from her then we would all be saying it's the right thing to do.
Taking the child out seems a drastic thing to do but we don't know the state of the lady at the time.
Sounds like someone had to make a big call.