Mom abandons baby, taken to court

New Delhi: A curse seems to have struck a four-month old girl, suffering from a serious disease and abandoned by her mother, with her father running from pillar to post to make his estranged wife breast-feed her medicines.

According to the doctor, the medicines have to be administered to the baby, suffering from Erb's Palsy, only through the mother's milk and not orally.

Erb's palsy is paralysis of the arm caused by injury to its main nerves during a difficult delivery.

While the girl, who was allegedly abandoned by her mother when she was two months old, is battling with the disease, her father's efforts to get back the mother has not yielded any result and an ugly court fight has started between the couple.

Strange as it may seem, the husband, who claimed to be  unaware of his estranged wife's whereabouts, moved the Delhi high court with a habeas corpus petition to trace his missing spouse.     

When the woman appeared in the high court, she refused to join him or take the child's custody for three months to administer her medicines.

She told the court that she was allergic to the medicines which needed to be given to child through breast milk and that she cannot consume them.

The court recorded her statement and disposed of the matter, bringing the situation to square one.

Upset over the outcome, the husband, a lawyer by profession, has now knocked the doors of the trial court for penal action against his wife for abandoning the child.    

Metropolitan Magistrate Abhilash Malhotra directed the Delhi Police to file an Action Taken Report in the matter.

Though the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act 2015, provides punishment for abandoning a child, it is silent regarding the remedy of restitution of the minor with parents.

A person, aware of the case but sought anonymity, gave a very peculiar narrative to the entire story saying that an important question arises whether a child has a right to seek love and care from biological parents.

He said though the law recognised restitution of conjugal rights of a spouse against another, there is a vacuum in the law regulating the rights of a child who has been abandoned by a biological parent to seek restitution of their company.

In the absence of any such remedy under the law, the court would have to deal with this peculiar situation whether it could direct the mother to take care of her infant, who is in dire need of medicines to be given through her or ask her to keep the child with her.

The girl child, born to a Delhi family on December 9, 2017, suffered from Erb's Palsy in which there was a partial paralysis in her left arm and the doctors have advised certain precautions, medicines and exercises, the complaint said.