
Star post
This blog post
Bipolar patient has capacity to decide to terminate pregnancy
about this judgment of the Court of Protection
SB (A Patient; Capacity To Consent To Termination), Re [2013] EWHC 1417 (COP) (21 May 2013)
has set me thinking.
. . .
A tense, life-or-death, courtroom drama
Pitched against her own legal team, the mental patient, Mrs SB, had two psychiatrists, her mother, her father, her husband (presumably the baby’s father) and the NHS hospital in which she was sectioned, along with their various solicitors and barristers, all agreeing that she was “not thinking straight”.
Her baby was not legally represented in court. As the nice judge said, “the foetus has no independent rights which fall to be weighed or considered by me at all in these proceedings”.
Present (though hardly as a disinterested, mere spectator), was the enterprising would-be sub-contractor who had put in a last-minute bid to do the job, less than a week before the mother reached 24 weeks pregnant, and the baby’s life would have become untouchable. “A doctor employed by a well known body”, is how the judge described this potential beneficiary of the judge’s own hard day’s work, when the abortionist put in his own “hard day at the orifice”. Continue reading