Abortion in India: not a right but a state-sponsored programme

Our population control measures with their top-down, state-enforced approach, and their coercive, autonomy-violating components, need re-examination.

Non-therapeutic abortions (abortions other than those performed to save the life of the mother) are freely promoted, aggressively marketed and effectively enforced by state-co-opted medical professionals. Their unabashed enthusiasm to undertake non-therapeutic interventions is unethical, to say the least. But then, ethics are the first casualty when the state drafts the medical profession to solve social problems.

I do not oppose all abortions, but I am certainly against the state sponsored abortion programme. The state encourages unsafe abortions by default, when it does not enforce the safety provisions of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act. It also does the same thing by design, by tacitly approving unsafe abortion as a population control (read family planning) measure.

Any abortion involves the fundamental rights of two individuals -the mother and the foetus. While a woman has a right to privacy — the right not to have her own body interfered with — I believe that the foetus, too, has a right to life, a right to survive. To reconcile these two conflicting rights, and in deference to the rights of women, it has been legally decided that the woman’s right takes precedence till the foetus reaches 12 weeks of age. After that, the foetus is a legal person whose life cannot be taken away except by due process of law.

Women’s demands for contraception and abortion have been assiduously manipulated by the State towards its population control strategy. The medical termination of pregnancy is not provided as a reproductive right of women for unwanted pregnancies (to be exercised in the first 12 weeks). It is aggressively promoted as part of the state’s population policy (up to 20 weeks by law and after that by default).

Thanks to the pressure of the international community (read developed nations), Indian women of the reproductive age are at the mercy of the state and state-co-opted nongovernment organisations. No means are considered improper for the great cause of population control, promoted and financed by international agencies. Ethics are considered senseless niceties and safety norms are impractical in the face of the urgent need for population control. In fact, the state-sponsored programme for contraception and medical termination of pregnancy is a state-enforced medical solution to the social problem of poverty.

I am not against contraception, but it has to be as a freely available and accessible choice of individuals and not a state enforced or coerced measure. In India, contraception is promoted not as an individual choice but as a demand of the state.

Infanticide for reasons of poverty was justly considered barbaric. But the elimination of five million foetuses through MTPs, for the same reasons, brings international acclaim and rewards of funds. The deaths of thousands of women from septic abortions and improperly performed tubectomies are overlooked with impunity. The right of the state to eliminate foetuses, or to prevent children from being born alive, has no explicit or implicit sanction in the constitution. Let there be a debate on this subject.