Anti-abortion campaigners have won a High Court challenge to clarify government guidelines on abortion in Northern Ireland. The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (Spuc) claimed guidance to health professionals was misleading and legally inaccurate. The High Court ruled the Department of Health's guidelines be withdrawn. The court found the guidelines failed to deal properly with counselling and conscientious objection. The judge, Lord Justice Girvan, stopped short of quashing the document issued by the Department of Health in March. Spuc was seeking a declaration that the decision to publish the advice to health professionals was unlawful.
A couple have spoken of their shock after an IVF clinic mix-up led to their last embryo being wrongly implanted into another patient. They were further angered when it emerged the other woman was given the morning-after pill. The couple from Bridgend won their case for damages after the mistake at Cardiff's University Hospital of Wales. Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust apologised "unreservedly" for the error and said it had improved checking procedures. The trust admitted gross failures in care and has also agreed to pay an undisclosed settlement to the couple.
A controversial court that still holds its hearing in private will decide tomorrow whether a pregnant woman with learning difficulties should be forcibly sterilised once she gives birth. Health workers from a local NHS trust and council, who cannot be named for legal reasons, have asked the secretive Court of Protection to decide whether the woman should be forced to have her fallopian tubes cut to stop her falling pregnant again.
Days after an Israeli court made a landmark ruling allowing the family of a deceased 17-year-old girl to harvest and freeze the eggs from her ovaries, the family has apparently bowed to domestic pressure to drop efforts to push ahead with the procedure. The family of Chen Aida Ayish, who was gravely injured in a car crash 10 days ago, had appealed to the court to extract her eggs after doctors declared her brain dead, Israeli media had reported. The court's ruling was unprecedented in Israel, and possibly globally, but immediately sparked a backlash from religiously conservative communities in Israel, a source familiar with the case said yesterday, prompting the family not to take the case any further. Ms Ayish, 17, fell into a coma after she was hit by a car 10 days ago. Doctors at the Kfar Saba hospital pronounced her brain dead last Wednesday, and her parents decided to donate her organs, and probe the possibility of harvesting her eggs.
The sperm sample of a person undergoing chemotherapy treatment, stored by a hospital for his benefit for future use in case the treatment made him infertile, was property owned by him whose loss or damage entitled him to bring an action for negligence. Moreover, where the circumstances showed there was a bailment of the sperm to the hospital unit storing it, a cause of action for bailment could arise for its loss or damage sounding in damages for psychiatric injury and/or mental distress.
A sample of sperm from a person undergoing chemotherapy, which a hospital stored in case he became infertile after the treatment, was that person’s property and its loss or damage was capable of establishing a claim in negligence. Further, where the hospital’s storage was undertaken gratuitously in the sense that it was a bailee of the sperm, any breach of duty in its safe storage causing loss or damage entitled the owner to recover damages in bailment for psychiatric injury and/or mental distress.