Doctor ordered to pay child support for baby who survived abortion

Madrid, Spain, May 25, 2012 / 15:02 pm

A judge in the Spanish city of Palma has ordered a doctor and his clinic to provide financial support for a baby who survived a botched abortion until the child's 25th birthday.

According to local media, the mother of the child attempted to procure an abortion on April 20, 2010. Two weeks later, the doctor – identified as E.R.K. – said X-rays showed the baby had been extracted from the womb.

Three months later, however, the woman discovered she was still pregnant. She returned to the clinic to undergo another abortion, but because she was in her twenty-second week, the clinic refused to perform the procedure.

In the ruling, the judge said the mother did not want the child and had done everything legally possible to prevent his birth. For this reason, he argued, she could not be compelled to support the baby, who is now 18 months old.

The doctor was also ordered to pay the woman $530,000 in damages.

Reacting to the news, the president of the local Baleares Medical College, Antoni Bennassar, criticized the ruling and asked, “Were the damages from the baby being born or not being born?”

Bennassar said the judge's order was surprising to him not only as a doctor but also as “a normal person.” People are punished for crimes and assaults, not for births, he noted.