A pregnant Italian woman had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers in England, where she was temporarily on a work trip, the British and the Italian press report.
Essex social services obtained a High Court order to sedate the woman, perfome a caesarean and take her child after she had suffered a mental breakdown. The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman. However, as The Telegraph reports, the case has now developed into an international legal battle.
The baby girl is still in the care of British social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, though she seems to have made a full recovery.
"An unprecedented case", claims Brendan Fleming, the woman’s British lawyer, who told The Sunday Telegraph: “I have never heard of anything like this in all my 40 years in the job. If there were concerns about the care of this child by an Italian mother, then the better plan would have been for the authorities here to have notified social services in Italy and for the child to have been taken back there.”
Lawyers are now demanding to know why Essex social services appear not to have contacted any next of kin in Italy or Italian authorities to consult them on the case before taking any action.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was in Britain in July last year to attend a training course with RyanAir at Stansted Airport in Essex. She suffered a panic attack while in her hotel room and called the police. The woman, who suffers from bipolar disorder and failed to take her medication regularly according to relatives, was taken to a psychiatric facility. According to her lawyers, when she said she wanted to return to her hotel, she was restrained under the Mental Health Act. The woman says that, after five weeks in the ward, one morning she was forcibly sedated and, when she woke up, she was told that the child had been delivered by C-section and taken into care.
The case has also been taken to a judge in the High Court in Rome, which has questioned why British care proceedings had been applied to the child of an Italian citizen who resides in Italy. However, the Italian judge accepted that the British courts had jurisdiction over the woman, who was deemed to have had no “capacity” to instruct lawyers.
In February, the mother returned to Britain to request the return of her daughter at a hearing at Chelmsford Crown Court.
Her lawyers say that she had since resumed taking her medication, and that the judge formed a favorable opinion of her. But he ruled that the child should be placed for adoption because of the risk that she might suffer a relapse.
The woman’s other children, aged 11 and four, are being raised by the grandparents in Italy.
