Conclusion

Conclusion:

August 10 1971 was a historic day in more sense than one. A path breaking legislation was enacted by Parliament called the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act. It was supposed to herald an era which would eliminate unwanted or forced pregnancies, or going to quacks that resulted in postnatal trauma.

It was also for the first time anywhere, that failure of contraception was legally accepted as a valid reason for termination of a pregnancy, irrespective of the fact that the woman was undergoing her first or subsequent pregnancy, or whether or not she had any surviving children. The consent of the woman was required in writing and a medical practitioner had to form an opinion in good faith that the pregnancy being terminated was either life threatening or its continuance would cause grave physical or mental injury to the woman. In fact, all he had to do was to tick an option on a printed form without even recording the clinical reasons for doing so. It was as simple as that. Everybody got the impression that abortion had been legalized, whereas the Act only specified certain conditions under which a pregnancy could be terminated. Most doctors, lawyers and social workers are still under that wrong impression today.

Women activists hailed this as a big step in empowering their kind. It was anything but that, as the choice to be exercised by the woman was in name only; the Act had left that choice with the medical practitioner. That the act was passed with the intent to also control the population is understandable, but this part of the Act which covered the failure of contraception was to cause devastation of such magnitude that the Child Sex Ratio (CSR) in the age group of 0 to 6 dropped sharply from 962 females per 1000 males in 1981, to 927 in 2001, that is a drop of 35 points in 20 years compared with a drop of 14 points for the previous 20 years from1961 to 1981. The rate of decline had accelerated by 150%.

Had the lawmakers envisaged this, they would have thought twice. Female foetuses were being selectively aborted in very large numbers on grounds of failure of contraception in blatant contravention of the spirit of the Act. Ultrasony arrived in the early 1980s, which explains the sudden drop thereafter, though the Act itself became law in 1972. Sex could be determined anytime after 12 weeks and a simple tick or a signature in blue or black ink in an ultrasound clinic could mean a death sentence. The male child syndrome which has always been prevalent in India was now a realizable, low cost option. Advances in technology, legislation gone badly wrong, and a disregard for ethics by the noble profession together achieved for India the dubious distinction of having one of the lowest CSRs in the world.

There was no need to undergo the entire term of pregnancy as also the process of childbirth before getting to know whether it was a girl or a boy. Very convenient, very clean, very cheap. It was like a win win situation for all; the family, the clinic, the doctor and the woman who for the first time by herself or coerced by her family could actually opt for the sex of the child by repeatedly conceiving and aborting. Never mind that her mental and reproductive health was being battered in the process. There was a proliferation of clinics in the 1980s to determine sex and abort thereafter. That most of the clinics were not approved as per the provisions of the Act, and therefore illegal did not matter; as the public perceived that abortion had been legalized. A law which was essentially passed to curb illegal abortion ended up doing exactly the opposite. The tragedy is that this has not been recognized by the government, activists and NGOs who are in this field of work.

The Census' findings of Child Sex Ratios are particularly damning. It reveals a deadly arc-spanning counter clockwise from Himachal in the North to Maharashtra in the West, which has become a vast killing field. This geographically contiguous area also includes the states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. UP and MP also cling to this area but to a lesser extent. One welcome observation is that every state of the North East (where under-development is wide-spread) is well above the national average and the average of every other state including Andhra which is the highest at 964 inspite of a literacy rate just above Bihar, UP and Rajasthan.

Just as there is an arc in the Northern and Western parts of the country, it has a polar opposite that extends from the South towards the East, in which the drop in the CSR is well below the national average. This arc constitutes all the Southern states as well as Orissa, West Bengal and Bihar. The major part of the killing field is the so-called developed and industrialized belt where the per capita income as well as the literacy rate (except for Rajasthan and UP) is well above the national average.

The only state where there has been a positive growth in the CSR is Kerela; no surprises here, since the structure of society is matrilineal and the dominant political philosophy is Marxist even though the Congress is in power today. The ratio has increased in the last decade by 5 points to 963. West Bengal is the only state where the overall sex ratio has steadily risen over the last 40 years and has contributed positively to the Indian average.

It is estimated that had the CSR stabilized in 1981 there would have been an additional 3 million girl children in the head count taken in 2001. A study conducted on 7000 abortions recorded in Pune showed that a single male foetus had been aborted. Some studies have suggested that up to ten times the number of officially reported abortions are performed in rural areas under primitive conditions, and in unregistered clinics in urban areas. This figure is impossible to verify. This feticide on a horrendous scale has led to the steep drop in the CSR. Translated into sociological impact, this would imply an increase in the incidence of sexual crime against women and children as also increased hostility between males leading to breakdowns in family’s disorder in day-to-day life, forced homosexuality and a rise in the incidence of HIV. The standard text on Indian Social Problems will need substantial revision.