New Dehli: An Indian court ruled on Tuesday that doctors were free to carry out an abortion on a 10-year-old girl who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather.

Indian law severely restricts access to abortion after 20 weeks, except when the life or health of the mother is endangered. A medical board in the northern Indian state of Haryana determined that the girl's pregnancy was nearing the 21-week mark and that it posed no danger to the mother.

But the law also allows for abortions under "exceptional circumstances", and the medical board petitioned the court for a decision on whether this situation met the criteria.

Dr SK Dhattarwal, head of the forensic medicine department at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Rohtak, said that, with the court decision, the medical board had determined that it was in the girl's best interest to perform the procedure as soon as possible.

If the pregnancy were allowed to proceed further, he said, she "will face psychological trauma; the pregnancy is not that advanced now". On that basis, he added, "We have started the process during the day today."

The case came to light last week when police received a tip on a helpline dedicated to crimes against women. The caller was the girl's mother, said Pankaj Nain, police chief of Rohtak district in Haryana state.

Investigators found that the girl had been "repeatedly raped by her stepfather over a period of time," said a police inspector at a Rohtak police station devoted to crimes against women.

"We found the girl in very miserable condition," said the inspector, Garima, who, like many Indians, goes by a single name.

The girl's mother and stepfather worked as day labourers on construction sites, and her stepfather, who was in his early 20s, would exploit her mother's absence to rape the girl, Dr Dhattarwal said.

The victim was examined by a medical board consisting of seven doctors, Dr Dhattarwal said. They concluded that she was 10 to 12 years old, and that her pregnancy exceeded 20 weeks.

"She is traumatised and not able to speak properly," he said. "She was not able to understand what was going on with her. She was subjected to sexual intercourse several times."

Two other recent rapes in the region have reinforced India's reputation as dangerous for women. The badly mutilated body of a woman in her early 20s was found last week, and medical examiners said the bones in her head had been shattered and sharp objects inserted into her vagina.

"It was a brutal sexual assault-cum-murder," said Dr Dhattarwal, who also supervised the medical examination in that case. He said the woman's assailants had tried to smash her head and disfigure her face to make her unrecognisable.

The victim's relatives said she had been harassed by one of the men suspected in the rape. The police have made two arrests in the case.

Also last week, a young woman was dragged into a moving car by a group of men as she was walking home after midnight. The police said she was raped repeatedly for hours in the moving car, then thrown onto the road in the city of Gurgaon, just south of New Delhi.

The cases recalled the 2012 rape of a physiotherapy student in Delhi who had boarded a private bus with a male friend after seeing a movie at a mall and was fatally injured during a sexual assault.

The death of the woman, who became known as "Nirbhaya", or "fearless," infuriated many Indians, who had become exasperated by the casual harassment of women in public spaces.

Five men were sentenced to death in that case, and last week India's Supreme Court upheld the verdict.

New York Times