NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court has permitted a 28-week pregnant woman to undergo medical termination of pregnancy on account of substantial fetal abnormality and said that reproductive choice is a dimension of personal liberty enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution.
Justice Jyoti Singh, while allowing the woman’s plea to undergo the procedure, stated that allowing the pregnancy to continue would have a deleterious impact on the petitioner’s mental health and she cannot be deprived of the freedom to take a decision to continue or not to continue with the pregnancy in view the medical board’s opinion.
The judge observed that the lack of compatibility of the fetus with a healthy and normal life as in view of the medical experts, the child would require cardiac surgery in the initial stage of life as well as repeat cardiac surgeries in late adolescence or adulthood.
It noted that the child would be exposed to ‘intra and post-operative complications and may lead to further complexities’ which would adversely impact the quality of the life and the opinion of the medical experts that the child was ‘likely to have an average physical growth’ came with a caveat that the surgical repair is successful.
The court permitted the petitioner to undergo termination of pregnancy at a medical facility of her choice and recorded that the medical board constituted in the case has explained the possible complications of the procedure of termination to the couple.
The court had, on December 22, asked the AIIMS to set up a medical board at the earliest for the examination of the woman.