Indian Court Rules 10-Year-Old Rape Victim Can Have Abortion

India's top court approved the appeal by the parents of the 10-year-old girl who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather to abort. India's restrictive abortion law does not allow women to abort after 20 weeks except in the cases where the mother's health is in danger. The young girl is between 19 to 21 weeks pregnant.

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The parents of the girl worked day jobs at different sites and the stepfather who is in his 20s took advantage of the parents' absence to rape the child, Dr. S. K. Dhattarwal, head of the medical forensic department at Rohtak’s Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, who conducted the medical examination told the New York Times.

According to the complaint filed by the mother, the girl's stepfather had been raping her for a long time and had threatened the girl with dire consequences if she dared to disclose it to anyone.

A medical board consisting of seven doctors who examined the victim said she was between 10 and 12 years old and was a little over 20-weeks pregnant. The decision was made after the panel in Rohtak, Haryana, located at the border of the nation's capital, decided that even though the girl's health was not at risk, she was suffering from trauma.

“She is traumatized and not able to speak properly,” Dr. Dhattarwal told the New York Times. “She was not able to understand what was going on with her. She was subjected to sexual intercourse several times.” While the rapist has been arrested, the heinous incident has once again shown that crime against girls and women continue to plague the country.

At the beginning of May, India's top court gave its final judgment over the horrific "Nirbhaya" rape case of 2012 that drew widespread international condemnation, where a 23-year-old medical student, Jyoti Singh, was gang-raped in a moving bus in India's capital. Calling the crime,"completely revolting" and "committed in an extremely fiendish, demonic, barbaric and nefarious manner," the supreme court ruled the four rapists in the 5-year old case be hanged.

According to the BBC, over 10,000 children were raped in 2015. A little over half the children who took part in a government survey reported some form of abuse.