A mentally ill British woman, who insists that she will take her own life if forced to continue with a pregnancy, cannot be barred from having an abortion, a judge in London has ruled.
The judgment was given shortly after 9pm last night because a decision had to be made quickly to comply with legislation that bars abortions in Britain after the 24th week of pregnancy.
In his ruling, Mr Justice Holman said it had to be established that the woman, who suffers from bipolar disorder, lacks mental capacity before she could be stopped by the courts, even though he accepted that she is “mentally unwell”.
Under the law, the woman is entitled to make a decision “which may be unwise”, or with which others would disagree “including myself” if she is shown to have enough capacity to know her own mind, he said.
Psychiatrists argued that the woman does not have the mental capacity to decide because of her mental problems, which have affected her on and off for eight years, leading to paranoia and other problems.
The judge said doctors believe the woman “is not thinking straight and would, in time, come to regret having an abortion”.
Foetal scan
Experts and family had argued that the woman began to seek an abortion only after she had stopped taking her medication and because a foetal scan at 20 weeks indicated that she would give birth to a girl.
She accepted that she had wanted to have a child before she became pregnant but she said she had changed her mind because she believed her husband was not interested in having a child.
In addition, she feared that if the child was a girl her husband would send her to live abroad, where she would be at risk of female genital mutilation — claims strongly denied by her husband.
Hospital staff had told her, he said, that she could have the baby adopted if she did not want to keep it.
Questioned by the judge, the woman, who cannot be identified, insisted her demand for an abortion remained unchanged.
'A new life'
"I want it more than ever. In the situation that I am in, the idea of me having a baby is crazy," she said, before insisting she wanted to part from her husband and from her mother and "start a new life".
Saying that no woman opted for an abortion with pleasure, she said that “it isn’t a lovely experience”. She said she had never regretted having an abortion 18 months ago, though she regretted becoming pregnant.
However, counsel for the health authority that sanctioned her committal said some of her rational grounds for wanting a second abortion are now “intermingled’ with grounds that are not rational.
She had had an abortion 18 months ago abroad because she believed that particular foetus had been damaged by the drugs she had been prescribed to treat bipolar disorder.
Her husband had not been the father on that occasion and she told the court that she was not sure who was, though the judge interjected at this point saying he did not want her questioned on her sex life.
In April she went to an abortion referral centre where she was approved for an abortion by two doctors, but she refused an offer of a surgical abortion in a clinic in the north of England.
She said she turned it down because she wanted to end the pregnancy by using drugs, rather than by surgery in which, she said, the foetus is “torn limb from limb”.
She failed to turn up later for a second appointment for a surgical abortion, telling the judge that she had ordered drugs on the internet to end the pregnancy herself.
However, the woman did not have time to take them, because she was committed to a psychiatric hospital on the orders of doctors who believed she was suffering “a manic episode with psychotic symptoms”.
