Court refuses to help jilted man after lover ran away with newborn

The court ruled that the woman had a choice of deciding who was to discharge her from the hospital and whose bosoms she could lie on in love. [iStockphoto]

But the law did not help him either. He lost the case against the hospital before the Magistrates Court, High Court, and now the Court of Appeal.

While concurring with Justices Ngugi and Tuiyott that the appeal was for dismissal, Justice Kiage said:" The field of love, no doubt, is littered with the wreckage of many a broken heart. The tears that have flowed, in the wake of betrayal, perfidy, and other two-or multiple-timing adventures of lovers, is beyond reckoning. Thus must one who ventures into love do so alive to the perils that abound."

The first to dismiss the case was Senior Resident Magistrate Maureen Shimenga in 2019.

Aggrieved, he moved to the High Court. Justice William Musyoka threw out the case in 2020. He tried to implore the judge to suspend the judgment but the judge threw out the application too.

In 2021 he challenged Justice Musyoka's judgment before the Court of Appeal. However, the three-judge bench also could not find a cure in law for his woes.

"The lesson learnt is that the wounds of love find scant balm in the courts of law. Love's ills and woes can only be found in lovers return and reconciliation, failing which in accepting and moving on, while holding onto hope for comfort elsewhere, or leaving love's threshing floor altogether," Justice Kiage continued.

According to the judges, the woman had a choice of deciding who was to discharge her from the hospital and whose bosoms she could lie on in love.

The judge said; "Judges may empathise with the deceived first man, but cannot in law agree with him that the hospital should compensate him for not detaining the woman, till the man who brought her in should claim and discharge her."

"Adult she is, a free moral agent (though the man may protest the word 'moral') and in a free country she is perfectly free to associate with and as in this case, be discharged from hospital in the company of whomever she pleases," he added.

The judge's conclusion was that he ought to gather the remnants of his mangled heart and move on as the embers of love and deception that crashed it are the same ones that once ignited his flesh, heart and mind with want.

"It must cut to the core that the woman, in this case, declared the other man, one Echesa, as the child's father, and not the appellant but, are not the hearts of men, and of women, deceptive above all things? It dawns on the appellant, alas too painfully, too late, there is no lie in the words, spoken usually in jest, that children are mothers' babies, but fathers maybes. And in the circumstance of this case, no remedy lies in law, least of all against the hospital," said Justice Kiage.