The Madras High Court recently said that removal of a married woman’s uterus after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, rendering her incapable of conceiving, cannot be termed as an act of mental cruelty towards her husband.
In a judgment passed on December 22, the Madurai bench of the High Court upheld the order of a family court which had rejected a man’s plea to dissolve his marriage on the grounds of mental cruelty, desertion and oppression.
The division bench of Justice RMT Tika Raman and Justice PB Balaji, while confirming the decision of the family court, rejected the petition of the petitioner husband. The woman’s husband had appealed against the order of the family court in the High Court.
In his petition he claimed that his wife had hidden important facts about his health. He argued that his wife’s inability to have children after the hysterectomy amounted to mental cruelty as defined under the Hindu Marriage Act.
Despite this, the High Court held that the family court was right in rejecting such a petition because the woman was diagnosed with cancer after her marriage. The High Court said that she had no symptoms of cancer before marriage, hence, it could not be said that she had concealed any medical information.
According to the report of Bar and Bench, the High Court wrote in its decision, “The wife is a cancer survivor. She has survived the brutal efforts of the dreaded disease cancer. However, during the treatment to fight cancer, on medical grounds and due to emergency and life-threatening condition the doctor removed her uterus and the husband was also informed about the same. In such circumstances, we find that merely during the subsistence of the marriage, the wife was suffering from cancer resulting in removal of the uterus, the same cannot be said to be a ground of mental cruelty for divorce.”
The High Court wrote in its judgment, “Therefore, considering the entire circumstances, we have no hesitation in holding that during the marriage, when the wife was diagnosed with ‘ovarian cancer’ and during the course of treatment, her uterus was removed. Given this, it cannot be considered as cruelty. This is very little ‘mental cruelty’ towards the husband because it is not the ‘act of the wife’ but merely ‘the act of fate or destiny’.”