ADJEI AND ANOTHER v. THE REPUBLIC

JUDGMENT OF APALOO J.A.

Apaloo J.A. delivered the judgment of the court. On 14 June 1966, both appellants were convicted of the offences of abetment of abortion and abortion respectively by Baidoo J. at the High Court, Kumasi, and each was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment with hard labour.

The complainant Akosua Nyarko is a trader and a housewife of Kumasi. Until the events which gave rise to this prosecution, the complainant lived with her eighteen-year-old niece Cecilia Kodom in the same house. The latter was in August 1965, a pupil attending a primary school at Kumasi. Akosua Nyarko's hometown is Nkoranza and the evidence shows that on or about August 1965, she paid a visit to her home at Nkoranza. She left her niece Cecilia at home. When she returned, she met Cecilia lying in bed. There was plenty of blood in her pants as well as on the bed on which she lay. When Cecilia was asked to get up, she could not. When the complainant helped her up, she noticed that Cecilia was bleeding from her female parts and appeared to be very weak.

After consulting her husband Mr. Adomako, the complainant ran Cecilia to St. Mary's Hospital — a private hospital at Mbrom Street. There, Dr. Appiah diagnosed Cecilia's illness as incomplete abortion. The doctor performed an emergency operation on Cecilia and evacuated from her womb the remaining products of pregnancy and blood clots. Dr. Appiah was of opinion that Cecilia's case was not natural miscarriage but that there was an interference with the pregnancy. This, the doctor said, was proved by the fact that there was a tear of the uterus and such tear in the doctor's opinion, could have been caused by a sharp instrument.

When Cecilia recovered from the operation, she admitted to her parents that abortion was caused on her with an instrument by a person who lived at Bantama but whose name she did not then know. She took the complainant and her step-father Mr. Adomako to a house at Bantama and there pointed to a room in which the person who used the instrument on her lived. An inmate of that house gave the name of the second appellant as the occupant of that room and described his place of work as the blood laboratory, Central Hospital. Upon receipt of this information, Cecilia who was still on admission at St. Mary's Hospital, was returned there while her step-father in company of Adjei, her brother, proceeded to the Central Hospital with a view to locating the second appellant. They located him without difficulty.