Abortion sans wife's consent a grave crime; pre-arrest bail denied to man

Mumbai: Abortion without the wife's consent is a heinous crime, the Bombay high court has held while refusing the pre-arrest bail to a Wadala resident. Irshad Haq faces charges of dowry harassment and conspiring with a doctor and a nurse to get his wife's pregnancy medically terminated without her consent.

"It is a heinous offence. The husband, doctor and nurses have connived to abort the foetus of the woman without her consent and by fabricating the records," said Justice Sadhana Jadhav. The court pointed out that Irshad himself had taken his wife to the hospital. "Taking into consideration the material collected in the course of the investigation and upon perusal of the record, this court is of the opinion that the applicant does not deserve to be enlarged on bail," added the judge.

Irshad has been charged for the offence of causing miscarriage without the woman's consent under Section 313 of the Indian Penal Code. If convicted, the maximum punishment prescribed for the offence is life imprisonment. He has also been booked for offences of dowry harassment, assault, criminal breach of trust and intimidation.

Additional public prosecutor M G Patil informed the court that while a nurse has been held, another co-accused, Dr Gazi Rehman, is yet to be arrested. Irshad had married the victim in 2010. In her complaint, the wife said that he would regularly demand that she fetch money from her parents. In November 2016, she got pregnant and Irshad demanded that she drop the baby. On December 17, 2017, he allegedly assaulted her with kicks and a belt and threatened her that if she did not go in for an abortion, he would divorce her. He then took her to Jyoti Clinic where she was given a tablet by the nurse. When she suffered from excessive bleeding, she called her brother, who arrived and took her to Sion Hospital. She then lodged an FIR against her husband at Wadala TT police station.

Irshad claimed he was falsely implicated in the case and his wife had consented to the abortion. The judge perused the hospital papers and pointed out that his wife had consented to admitting herself to the hospital and not the abortion. In her statement, the nurse told the police that Dr Gazi had allegedly accepted Rs 14,000 for the abortion and asked her to throw the foetus in a canal.

"It is clear that it is not a consent for abortion. It is a consent for admission. The records have been fabricated to show that the patient was discharged against medical advice although she had undergone abortion in the said hospital in the intervening night," said the judge while dismissing Irshard's application.