The forced Caesarean case proves that light must be shone on social services and the courts

It’s no joke, having a Caesarean, and I’ve had two. So the news that Essex County Council social services obliged a pregnant, mentally ill Italian woman to have her baby in this fashion – normally, you talk the thing over with a consultant – was perhaps the scariest element of the case when I first read about it. I mean, unless there was a medical emergency, that would count as assault by most people’s reckoning. But after reading more it’s hard to know which bit of the story to be most outraged about: the forcible removal of a child from the woman whose bipolar disorder is now, apparently, under control and who desperately wants to keep her daughter, or the assumption by Essex social services that they cannot hand the baby over to the care of her father (the woman’s ex-husband) and grandparents who are, right now, looking after her two siblings.