CHENNAI: A 24-year-old nurse’s attempt to deliver her child on her own without the knowledge of her colleagues or hostel mates went horribly wrong, after she ended up chopping off the infant’s legs, one of which she flushed down the toilet of her hostel in T Nagar on Tuesday.
By the time her hostel mate heard her cries and rushed the young mother and child to the hospital, the infant had already died. While she claimed that the child was stillborn, the Mambalam police have registered a case and are investigating.
According to the police, the nurse, W Vinisha (24) of Kanniyakumari, was working at a private hospital in T Nagar and was staying at the staff quarters on South Boag Road. Police investigations revealed that she was seven months pregnant, which she hid from her colleagues.
Officials said she was in a relationship with a software professional in the city, which she ended a few months ago. When she realised she was pregnant by then, she had tried to abort the pregnancy. However, the attempt was unsuccessful.
During the early hours, she locked herself in the washroom and tried to self-deliver the child by performing an episiotomy procedure. In the process, she cut off the newborn’s legs while taking out the baby. She flushed one leg down the toilet, police said.
A little while later, her hostel roommate who went to check on her found the nurse lying in a pool of blood and the child in a bucket.
One of the child's legs was on the bathroom floor. She alerted the others in the hostel and together they rushed the woman and the child to the hospital where the child was declared as brought dead.
Police were alerted about the incident after which a team recovered the child's body and moved it for postmortem examination. "A day before trying to deliver the child on her own, she had complained of dizziness and back pain to her colleagues. They gave her medicines, but none of them suspected that she was pregnant," a police officer said.
The Mambalam police have booked a case under Sections 315 (act done with intent to prevent child being born alive or to cause it to die after birth) and 201 (Causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information) of IPC and are investigating.