MUMBAI: How to handle a pregnant teenager who doesn’t want the child? The Kasturba Marg police station’s senior officers have been grappling with this dilemma over the past week when they arrested a Borivli schoolboy, whose 15-year-old girlfriend is pregnant.

The girl’s parents, who are roadside vendors, approached the police who arrested the boy on charges of rape, as the girl was a minor. A senior policeman said the sensitive issue was the fact that the girl was in the sixth month of her pregnancy and her parents did not want the unborn baby. The family had, in fact, sought an abortion when they found about their daughter’s predicament but the hospital turned them away as the girl was already 24-week pregnant. According to abortion laws, pregnancy can be medically terminated within 20 weeks of conception.

The girl is now in a government hospital and the Kasturba Marg police, which arrested her boyfriend, have sent him to children’s remand home.

Both the teenagers study in the same school and they have been in a relationship for the past one year. While the girl’s father is a vender, the boy father runs a small business in Borivli (E). The two often visited the Borivli national park where they had sex several times in the past few months, said the police.

The case has also brought to the fore the poor level of awareness about sex among teenagers. The girl reportedly did not realize that she was pregnant till very late, and even her mother failed to notice any change in her physical appearance. The girl told the police that she learnt about her condition only last week and told her mother. The girl’s parents approached a clinic for an abortion, but given the advanced stage of her pregnancy, the doctors turned them away, the police said.

