In a significant move, the Union Cabinet has approved the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (Amendment) Bill, 2020, which proposes to extend the upper limit for abortion in India to 24 weeks from 20 weeks. This is welcome in that any move that expands safe abortion choices for women is great. After all, this is about women having autonomy over their bodies and the agency to decide when – if at all – they will have children. Robbing women of this fundamental choice is the load-pillar of patriarchy. The latter sees women as servile baby-making machines, that too to serve the honour of and provide socio-economic benefits to their husbands’ families.

This mindset not only leads to a diminution in women’s status in society, hampering their development as productive human beings, but also creates a poor environment for new mothers and their babies. Again, in all of this it is the woman that suffers – it is she who can’t develop, it is she who has to give up her career, it is she who has to give up her education, it is she who is relegated to second-class status. Women should have the choice to have children only when they are fully ready. And expanding abortion options enhances this autonomy.

In this regard, the new MTP amendment proposes the requirement of opinion of one medical provider for termination of pregnancy up to 20 weeks of gestation and introduces the requirement of opinion of two medical providers for termination of pregnancy of 20-24 weeks of gestation. This is an improvement on the current law which mandated the opinion of two medical providers for abortion beyond 12 weeks of pregnancy up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. Beyond 20 weeks abortion was not allowed and those seeking to terminate their pregnancy after that threshold had to approach the courts. But restrictive interpretations of the existing law by courts and medical practitioners, even in cases where the woman in question was raped and bearing the child of her attacker, or where foetal abnormalities had been detected beyond 20 weeks, were rightly seen as perpetuating injustice.

Thankfully, the new amendment proposes to remove the upper gestational limit in cases of substantial foetal abnormalities as diagnosed by a medical board. It also proposes to enhance the upper gestational limit directly to 24 weeks for special categories of women including survivors of rape and incest. All of these are steps in the right direction. After all, abortion is one of the safest medical procedures when performed by trained medical practitioners in well-resourced environments. In fact, the WHO’s ‘Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems’ clearly illustrates the different medical options available for safe abortions by trained medical practitioners for different gestational ages. It also says that laws and policies that impose time limits on the length of pregnancy for which abortion can be performed may have negative consequences for women who have exceeded the limit and in such cases the women in question may be forced to seek unsafe abortion services which are a risk to them.

In this context, it would be better for India to have a clean law on medical termination of pregnancy with few or no exemptions and categories. This is not as radical as it seems. If the upper gestational limit can be removed in cases of foetal abnormalities, why not make the same services available for all abortion cases? For, isn’t it worse to force women to bear children they don’t want or are incapable of raising due to dire economic and social circumstances? Isn’t it worse that children are forced to be born into poverty, deprivation and unhealthy circumstances that will severely affect their development and inflict on them lifelong scars? It is an injustice for both women and the children they are forced to birth.

Thus, the new amendment to the abortion law in India is welcome but there is much scope to liberalise this further. True, India has a sex-selective abortion problem. But that has nothing to do with gender-neutral abortion choices per se. Sex-selective abortion needs to be combatted through education, women empowerment and better implementation of mechanisms against sex determination during pregnancy. Here, the women empowerment component is actually aided by making available abortion choices and boosting the decision-making capacity of women in society. In other words, a society where women are genuinely empowered and have credible decision-making authority will not have the problem of sex-selective abortion. Therefore, pro-choice abortion policies are critical to improving women’s status in society.