Wednesday 26 February 2014

Pain inside

I have seen two contrast cases recently and they have left me baffled. As a woman your greatest power to bring a life form into this world can be your greatest weakness too. Two women I know have destroyed their unborn lives -- one is happy and one sad. Happy because it was unwanted and she was unprepared. Sad, of course, because it was wanted but she had also not planned and was unprepared.
And here I am prepared and wanting and planning and all efforts in vain.
Life can be very cruel. I had heard about it but never had experienced it.
Now I know it very well.
Anyways, abortions, how horrifying it may sound, have also been a life saver and have protected many from social stigma. But certain malpractices and loopholes in this procedure has taken many lives or has left them infertile for life. Abortion was made legal in the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, which was passed in 1971 and came into effect in 1972. The Act permits abortion if the doctor believes “in good faith” that “…the continuance of the pregnancy would involve a risk to the life of the pregnant woman or of grave injury to her physical or mental health; or there is a substantial risk that if the child were born, it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”.
Statistics collected by Mumbai’s International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), a public health organisation, show that about 21 per cent of males and four per cent of females in rural areas admitted to pre-marital sex against an urban figure of 11 per cent of males and two per cent of females. The IIPS survey sample of 55,000 males and females comes from about 1.7 lakh households in Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. The age range is 15-29.
The government of India introduced family planning in 1952, and passed the MTP Act in 1972. It’s been 60 years since family planning was introduced, and 40 years since abortions were made accessible for women on many conditions, except on demand.
Prevalent lack of knowledge and unskilled medical officers have been a cause of worry. The sad woman I know faced the problem of incomplete abortion. Had she not been aware of the problem (from her lessons from past) and has she not been living in a metro city, unimaginable could have happened.