NEW DELHI – A 10-year-old assault victim whose plea for an abortion was rejected by India’s Supreme Court has given birth to a baby girl.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was assaulted several times allegedly by an uncle who has since been arrested.
Last month her parents asked the country’s top court to allow her to have a late-term abortion but the request was turned down.
Indian law does not allow medical terminations after 20 weeks unless there is a threat to either the life of the mother or her child.
“She gave birth through C-section today (Thursday). Both the girl and her baby are doing fine,” doctor Dasari Harish said from the northern Indian city of Chandigarh.
“The surgery was uneventful. There were no complications whatsoever. The baby weighed 2.2 kilos (4.8 pounds) and is in the neonatal ICU for now.”
The Press Trust of India news agency said the girl was unaware that she had delivered a child and the parents had decided to put the baby up for adoption.
Her parents have told her that she had a stone in her stomach and had undergone surgery to remove it, PTI said.
The girl alleges she was raped by her uncle, who has been arrested.
The 10-year-old girl’s family have said they do not want to have anything to do with the baby, so the infant will be looked after by the child welfare committee until she is put up for adoption.
A child-care official said the newborn, who had been placed in the intensive care unit of the hospital as she was born prematurely, had since been moved out to the nursery since she was stable.
Formalities would be initiated on Friday for the baby to be handed over to the child welfare committee, he added.
The girl’s case has dominated headlines in India for the past several weeks, with officials saying it is the first-ever case of a child so young giving birth.
A child under 16 is raped every 155 minutes, a child under 10 every 13 hours. More than 10,000 children were raped in 2015 in the Southeast Asian country.
