NEW DELHI: The High Court has upheld the criminal proceedings against a doctor accused of illegally terminating a 16-year-old girl’s six-week pregnancy without verifying her age or reporting the matter to the authorities.
Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav noted that according to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, a minor was incapable of independently consenting to termination, and her pregnancy cannot be medically terminated without guardian’s consent in writing.
The judge also pulled up the doctor for claiming that the minor’s age at the time of abortion was stated to be 20, saying, “The entire statutory architecture presupposes that age is a fact to be ascertained and recorded, not merely accepted on an unverified oral representation from an adult accompanying the patient.
The judge noted that according to the investigation, the adult accompanying the girl was “not in fact in any relation with the prosecutrix at all” and said that a registered medical practitioner performing an invasive procedure under the MTP Act, where the patient’s age is a determining factor, cannot be absolved of the responsibility to verify the patient’s age through documentary evidence merely because an accompanying person provides the age verbally.
The court was hearing an appeal filed against a trial court order passed in September 2020, directing further investigation into the case.
Survivor’s statement
In a statement, the survivor alleged that in July 2019 the woman who accompanied her pretended to be her aunt and told the hospital staff that the child belonged to the girl’s boyfriend and told her age to be twenty. The woman is also a co-accused in the case.
