India high court rules woman can abort 25-week preborn child

A woman in India has received permission from a high court to abort her 25-week old preborn child, even though the nation’s cutoff for abortion is 24 weeks.

Indian Express reports that the Bombay High Court ruled on February 13 that the 35-year-old woman could abort her child because the baby had been diagnosed with skeletal dysplasia. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, this is “the medical term for a group of about 400 conditions that affect bone development, neurological function and cartilage growth, including its most common form, achondroplasia.” Treatment is varied depending on the severity of the condition, and may involve future surgeries; while some children with the condition do die shortly after birth, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia emphasizes that “not all children with dysplasias have severe medical problems,” and “many of these children can live relatively normal lives.”

Regardless of the severity of the condition, no child should be killed by abortion due to a medical condition. At 25 weeks, the preborn child could potentially survive outside the womb if given proper medical treatment, can open his eyes and hear and respond to sounds, and has the ability to feel pain. Every human being, regardless of level of development, has the right to not be unjustly killed.

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Even should the child not live long after birth, he could spend what time he had wrapped in the loving embrace of a family, receiving every comfort and medical care possible. Instead, abortion rips that child apart or subjects him to a death by poison.

In its ruling, the high court held that the woman had a “right” to kill this child due to his or her prenatal diagnosis, though they said the killing should be done with the “utmost urgency” due to the child’s advanced gestational age. Abortion’s risks to women increase significantly as pregnancy progresses. As previously reported by Live Action News, a NIH study found:

… that a woman’s risk of death from abortion increased by 38% for each additional week of gestation. Compared to women who underwent abortions at or before eight weeks (two months), women who underwent abortions in the second trimester were found to be “significantly more likely to die of abortion-related causes.”

The results showed that “[u]p to 87% of deaths in women who chose to terminate their pregnancies after 8 weeks of gestation may have been avoidable if these women had accessed abortion services before 8 weeks of gestation.” 

“Conscious of the right of the Petitioner to reproductive freedom, her autonomy over the body and her right to choice, the medical condition of the Petitioner and having considered the findings and opinion of the Medical Board, we permit the Petitioner to medically terminate the pregnancy,” the court said.