If you needed any more reason to be weary of your rights as a pregnant women the UK has given us a starling and horrifying example.
In August 2012, an Italian women was given a forced c-section and had her child removed by British social services after having a panic attack while in the country for a business trip. The women called the Police after suffering a panic attack, apparently because she could not find the passports for her other two children who were with her mother in Italy. The police came to the women's hotel and took her into custody after speaking with her mother on the phone who indicated she had bi-polar but was not currently taking medication.
The police told the mother that they were taking her to the hospital to “make sure that the baby was OK”. They brought her to a mental hospital and though she said she wanted to go back to her hotel, she was restrained by orderlies, sectioned under the Mental Health Act and told that she must stay in the hospital. After five weeks she was told that she couldn't eat breakfast that morning and then was forcibly sedated and put through a cesarean section. She later woke up in a different hospital and was informed that her child had been delivered by c-section. She later learned that a high court judge, Mr Justice Mostyn, had given the social workers of Essex permission to arrange for the child to be delivered. Later on she was told that she would be escorted back to Italy without her baby.
The women, back in Italy, immediately resumed taking her medication and began the process of battling for the return of her daughter. She returned to the UK in February to regain custody of her daughter. The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she claims to have made a full recovery, the reason? The judge said that while she indeed seemed impressively "articulate" he could not risk a failure to maintain her medication in the future and therefore he ruled that the child must be placed for adoption.
Earlier in 2013, her American husband, who she is amicably separated from and who is the father of her eldest daughter- asked that the baby be sent to Los Angeles to live with his sister. The sister was described by her US lawyer as “a rock”. Because, however, the sister is not a blood relative of the Italian women she is not considered a relative of the baby.
When I first saw this story I figured it was a spoof. I thought, surely this is from the Onion or another parody website, right? Nope. I googled the case and many news outlets were running the story, it was indeed real life. This is an actual instance where the State forced a women to give birth while unconscious through an invasive procedure without her knowledge and or consent for the good of the BABY! The authorities then refused to give her her own child back. They are still refusing to give her her daughter back.
There are a number of disturbing things in this case besides the actual unprecedented procedure. Primarily the fact that she was taken into custody in the first place and held hostage in a psychiatric facility for over a month. Everything I read stated that she received appointed legal counsel only after the forced c-section of her daughter and that was at a hearing where she was told that she would be escorted back to Italy without her daughter. The case has been raised before a judge in the High Court in Rome, which questioned why British care proceedings had been applied to the child of an Italian citizen. The Italian judge accepted, though, that the British courts had jurisdiction over the woman, who was deemed to have had no “capacity” to instruct lawyers.
No capacity to instruct lawyers? A panic attack does not deem you incapable of having rights.
John Hemming, MP (Member of Parliament) who is advocating more openness in family court and raising this case in Parliament stated “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.”
No, she was not treated as a human being and as more details from the case become public, I am weary to think of what other abuses may have taken place. Argue anyway you'd like- but pregnant women or mothers with mental health issues are not treated as human beings. Yes, the welfare of the children is important but it is truly inhumane to drug a women in order to extract the fetus from her womb and then then take custody of the child.
Obviously the entire story has not yet been told, but one thing is absolutely certain- any women with any mental illness has to be extremely cautious when having or considering having children. If you take medication you risk certain birth defects and or fetal abnormalities which could be interpreted as endangering your child and if you do not take medication you can be certain that your untreated mental illness will be held against you. Women with mental health issues face double discrimination when carrying a child. There are those that would advocate terminating pregnancies of women with bi-polar and other depressive disorders, regardless of the desires of the women.
This case is one of my worst nightmares. As a women with mental illness I consider the ramifications of child bearing often and I struggle with the knowledge that being a functional, well-adjusted member of society may very well equal never procreating. The medications that I take daily are not approved for pregnant women and there are VERY few that are. I can't imagine that every women on medication feels the same way, what if they want to have children, don't they have that right? That's why social services or government intervention in birthing is so frightening. This Italian women already has two children, she is already a mother and a handful of strangers in a foreign country decided to knock her unconscious, steal her baby and claim that it was in the best interest of this child who hadn't even been born yet.
Mental illness holds its own stigma and in a society where pregnant women are already stripped of their own personal rights I wonder sometimes why so many women take the risk. In this case the State literally took over a women's body and removed the child from her womb while she was unconscious. 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.” There is simply no justification for that.
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