Telegraph:
Judge must unravel saga of baby snatched from womb
"When last week I broke the story of the Italian mother whose baby was forcibly removed from her womb and taken into care by Essex social workers, I had no idea what a storm this would unleash. Not only did the story make front-page news for four days running here in Britain, along with endless discussion on the radio and legal blogs, but it was reported in at least 41 countries across the world.
Two responses were particularly significant. The first was that Lord Justice Munby, who, since stepping up to become the head of our family courts, has robustly campaigned for our much-criticised child protection system to be opened up to “the glare of publicity”, now wishes to take over the case himself and to ask the social workers to explain their actions. The second was the publication not only of the judgment by Mr Justice Mostyn (pictured), who gave the original secret order for the baby to be removed in the Court of Protection, but also, very revealingly, a full transcript of the proceedings. It is this, above all, that has helped enormously to clarify understanding of this murky story, and makes it even more disturbing than it previously appeared.
On August 23 2012, when Alessandra Pacchieri had already been detained for five weeks in the psychiatric wing of an Essex hospital under the Mental Health Act, pleading to be allowed to return home to her family in Italy, Mostyn heard an application from the MidEssex Health Trust that the mother should be operated on next day to remove her baby, if necessary with use of force. Because the mother was deemed not to have the “mental capacity” to instruct her own lawyer, she was represented on behalf of the Official Solicitor by David Lock QC, who never met her.
The main evidence against the mother was two reports from a psychiatrist, Dr Rupesh Adimulam, who had diagnosed her as “psychotic” and “schizophrenic”, although her “bipolar” condition resulted from a chemical imbalance that had previously been corrected by medication. She had stopped taking that because she was advised that it was dangerous to unborn babies. An obstetrician’s report also said that a caesarean section was advisable because, with a natural birth as the mother wanted, there was a “1 per cent risk of uterine rupture”.
But Lock then raised a “multi-agency report” recommending that the mother should be given “a fair chance” of being treated for her condition in a mother-and-baby unit, allowing her child to stay with her. This point was not even considered by the court. Mostyn simply went on to suggest that, as soon as the baby was born, Essex social services should apply for an interim order to take the child into care, insisting that the mother “should not know about this order before she is taken and goes into hospital”. An order meeting Mostyn’s requirements, including use of force and withholding from the mother that Essex was to apply for a care order, was drafted by the health trust barrister and signed by Mostyn.
As we know from the mother, all went according to plan. Next day she was forcibly sedated, the operation took place and she woke up to find her baby gone, with her room “full of hospital staff and social workers”. She was briefly allowed to see and breastfeed her new daughter, but was forbidden to do this again (despite Munby’s ruling in an earlier case that to deny a mother the right to breastfeed her newborn baby is in breach of “the imperative demands of the European Convention on Human Rights”).
Ms Pacchieri says that her psychiatrist wanted her to be sent with her child to the mother-and-baby unit. But now the social workers had their care order, this gave them full control over what happened next. After three days the baby vanished from the hospital to be put into foster care. Weeks later, Alessandra was escorted by two hospital managers back to Italy, where her father owns a restaurant near Siena. After three weeks being treated in an Italian hospital, she was so fully restored to health that, when in February she returned to Britain to plead for her child not to be adopted, Judge Newton, who had seen her in October, said that she presented herself so impressively that she seemed almost a different person. But, because he could not rule out her failing to take her medication in the future, her child must be placed for adoption.
Such is the extraordinarily tangled saga which Lord Justice Munby has now set himself to unravel. We must hope that he studies Mostyn’s judgment and the events which followed very carefully indeed."