FALSE STATEMENT MADE ON BIRTH OF CHILD

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 October 1948, Page 6

FALSE STATEMENT MADE ON BIRTH OF CHILD

(PA) AUCKLAND, This Day. A story more like fiction than fact was told to the Magistrate, Mr J. H. Luxford, in the Police Court at Pukekohe today. A thrice-married woman, Joan Marcia Pryamid Whitford, aged 33 pleaded guilty to a charge of making a,false statement to the deputy registrar of births, that she was the mother and her husband the father of a male child born in November last at a nursing home in Auckland. The police said that Mrs Whitford, after friction with her husband’s father, came to Auckland pregnant but had a miscarriage unknown to her husband. After advertising in Auckland and Wellington newspapers seeking a baby for adoption, she met in Palmerston North a single woman who was about to have a baby and arranged for her to take the booking already made in the Auckland maternity hospital. Mrs Whitford paid all the expenses and took the baby home as her child. When interviewed by a detective on August 4 she admitted the offence, saying she thought the child would bring her and her husband together again. Defending counsel, Mr K. C. Aekins, said Mrs Whitford,’ who was in poor health, now lived in one house on a farm and her husband in another. The child would be taken away and adopted. “I cannot imagine anybody being more punished than this woman herself through telling lies,” the Magistrate said. “She will be convicted and discharged.”