Man jailed for punching nurse
Midwives magazine: Issue 1 :: 2012
A Muslim man from France has been jailed after punching a nurse who tried to remove his wife's burka during an emergency caesarean section.
Nassim Mimoune, 24, was banned from the delivery room after calling a midwife a ‘rapist’ when she attempted to perform an intimate examination on his wife.
She had been having contractions for two days when admitted and begged her husband to allow the examination, but he threatened to divorce her.
He was taken away to view the childbirth from another room at a hospital in Marseille after the outburst.
But when he saw the nurse removing his wife’s burka, he smashed open the locked door.
He barged into the operating room and punched the woman in the face, telling her to replace his wife's Islamic veil.
Mimoune, a construction worker from Paris, was arrested on a charge of assault, while his wife delivered a healthy baby boy.
At the trial in December the judge said he had put ‘his religious dogma above the laws of the republic and his French citizenship’.
Mimoune apologised to the court for his actions and admitted that he had endangered the life of his unborn child.
He added that seeing his wife's veil lifted in front of a male health worker was like seeing her ‘bare-chested’ in front of another man.
