'Woman has child taken from her womb by social services'

[Mapleduram]

Utterly shocking news in the Sunday Telegraph:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10486452/Woman-has-child-taken-from-her-womb-by-social-services.html

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.

Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.

The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown.

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 case has developed into an international legal row, with lawyers for the woman describing it as “unprecedented”.

You might like to see the quite long thread that is already running on this

The mother had been sectioned under the mental health act, and had been kept in for 5 weeks (and continuing?). That is a medical decision, and never taken lightly. It is indeed a rare ('unprecedented') set of circumstances.

The newspaper article is, of course, incomplete. And such highly relevant things as detail of what led to the sectioning and the range of medical prognoses for the mother will not be made public. Her assertion that she is recovered may not be the whole picture. And the child must come first.