India's Tryst with Abortion

Shantanu, you have balanced the pros and cons of abortion really well. Unfortunately it is because of this balance that there can never be a consensus on the topic of abortion. Everyone has a valid reason to either support it or reject it.

With all due respect to the court ruling, I feel the parents should have the final say. After all, it is their responsibility to look after the child when it is born.

I personally condemn aborting female fetuses. But if someone doesn't want a girl child, it is their personal call, however horrendous it may seem. I feel subjecting a female to abuse after birth is a bigger sin than aborting her in a fetus state. I'll be slaughtered for saying this, but not having a baby is better than having a baby forced upon you. For the child's sake at least.

Parental love can help overcome obstacles while raising an impaired child. However I will not doubt the parents' love if they abort their child to protect IT from the big bad world.

Raising a physically impaired child is hard and it depends on the individual parents to decide whether they are game for that as well. Examples of people like Stephan Hawking, though inspiring, are not always be practical in all cases.

"Those who are willing to kill before birth will have no compunctions in killing after birth too"

WHAT?!?!? seriously? are you meaning to make the argument here that people who are pro-choice are likely to commit murder?

please tell me that was simply a poorly worded statement.

smallsquirrel,

It is an intentionally made statement.

SS: I think the author is speaking about families who abort the girl child. In this context I feel the words "killing after birth" mean the oppression the girl/ other girls will face in future.

I'm giving the benefit of doubt to the writer. He can contradict me if I'm mistaken in my assumption.

I am with SS. What does he mean by intentionally made statement?
In a country like India I think it is wrong to force parents to have physically impaired child. I wonder what would have happened if Mehtas were very poor. Misery for parents and child alike. Is the state willing to provide support for this phisically impaired child?

shantanu... do you mean all people who are pro choice or people who abort female children simply because they are female?

shantanu, i thought you were a doctor?

morris - the state is willing and does provide in numerous ways provide support to bring up a physically impaired child. for details you can look up the web site of the ministry of social justice and empowerment. it is another matter that these services will improve and become better like any other service provided if there is sufficient awareness and public debate on their efficacy.

smallsquirrel - the words pro choice and pro life are US coinage and cannot be really applied in India's socio-demographic contexts- but to answer your question- here I am talking about people who abort female children because they are female.

commonsense - yes, i am a doctor working in the public health sector and especially reproductive health. which is why i have had the opportunity to know first hand the circumstances in which Indian women become pregnant, where they go( or most often do not go) for their ante natal care, what kind of contraception is available to them, where they would normally deliver their babies, who would deliver them and so on. if you are keen to read for yourself - a lot of information is available in the National Family Health survey III at http://www.nfhsindia.org/

shantanu... let's not play semantics. I know about the climate in India, and you know that. fine, supporting abortion and not supporting abortion.

pro-choice is a clear term. I never use the term pro-life because it is misleading. I am pro-choice but I clearly support life.

anyway, I do think your statement was a bit ambiguous. and I am not sure it is true. I find selective sex termination as repugnant as you do. but many do it out of ignorance, and I am not sure that means that in their daily lives they would murder someone. Although I am loathe to defend them, I think some of these people are more normal than you might think. upsetting or morally appalling as the decision might be to you, I do not think characterizing them as animals is quite fair. it is simply rhetoric.

Shantanu is a Christian (Catholic?), and his pro-life stance doesn't surprise me.

"Those who are willing to kill before birth will have no compunctions in killing after birth too- so we abort female fetuses before birth and ill treat them and rape them after birth; the unfinished task of killing and maiming that remained unfinished is completed in the cradle and beyond."

Utter rubbish. Aborting is only a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

Society either values sanctity of life or it can choose to open a floodgate of exceptions where people find all kinds of excuses and justifications to sacrifice life. It does not mean a person who aborts is likely to turn into murderer. It means society as a whole will eventually lose sanctity and respect for life - some sort of anarchy will creep in in the realm of sanctity of life. Right to abortion, abortion on demand subjects 'sanctity of life' to mercy and whims of individuals. One can't stop abortions degenerate to petty and frivolous reasons. One can justify abortion on any petty and personal grounds. If society lets people kill for food, for fun and entertainment, for personal gains, for career pursuits, for economic betterment, for research, for empowerment, than it can only raise the ante against life, until nothing remains sacred and everything becomes disposable, expendable, sacrificial. Sinful reactions can not be confined to 'necessary' or 'justifiable' killings. That is what happens when individuals get endowed with right to discard life.

Once culture of abortion is unleashed, people are going to use it for all kinds of big and small reasons. I think it is fake self-righteous posturing to embrace abortion as a personal choice but decry abortions used for limiting the size of family or limiting the composition of certain genders in a family - like everything else, they too are hard personal choices/decisions of individual families and should be respected by abortion advocates. And therein lies the perils of unrestricted abortions - therefore, it can not be a right, freedom or choice - that it has to be regulated and restricted, that it should be allowed only in extreme situations to protect the physical health of a mother or to prevent deformed babies.

Kerty, vegetarians use the same argument against non-vegetarians. Are non-vegetarians inherently more violent than vegetarians?

I do not think it is fair to draw conclusions like the one below-

"It means society as a whole will eventually lose sanctity and respect for life - some sort of anarchy will creep in in the realm of sanctity of life."

Two points:

1) When parents decide to have children, it is an implied 'risk' that they take: the child could be a girl, he/she could have physical deformities or mental problems, he/she could be a slow learner, and everything else. Every parent hopes that their child will be 'normal', and this hope implies the opposite too: the fear that their child will be 'not normal'. If this implied 'risk' is there, it doesn't justify abortion.

2) No family is devoid of problems caused by children. As a child grows up, all kinds of problems come in: bad in studies, bullying, sharp tongue, messed up relationships, falling in love with a "bad person", rebelliousness. Every parent prepares themselves for such problems. So why is this problem (physical deformity) any different than the others, and why aren't parents prepared for this too? Abortion is NOT justified in this case too.

I was once an abortion rights activist in the days when (in New York at least) abortion was illegal. Indeed, the swing vote in the New York State Assembly (the lower house of the state legislature) to make abortion legal in New York was cast by a Jew in a Catholic district - and he lost his seat as a result.

When I lived there, I took the view that Catholics should not shove their dogma down everyone else's throats, as this was primarily an issue of religious law - and that different religions had different points of view. Judaism looks at abortion differently from Catholicism.

Indeed, while watching a debate on this issue on TV, I saw a Catholic prelate make the dumb mistake of asserting that abortion should remain illegal in New York so that good Catholic girls wouldn't have abortions. He might have been honest and well meaning in his intent - but it was the worst thing he could have said. America is in fact a Christian country - but in those days, as today, Americans fed themselves the myth that they are a secular nation, favoring no religion over another.

After thirty-seven years, I have come to see the painful truth reflected by Kerty's words. To recap,

"Society either values sanctity of life or it can choose to open a floodgate of exceptions where people find all kinds of excuses and justifications to sacrifice life. It does not mean a person who aborts is likely to turn into murderer. It means society as a whole will eventually lose sanctity and respect for life - some sort of anarchy will creep in in the realm of sanctity of life. Right to abortion, abortion on demand subjects 'sanctity of life' to mercy and whims of individuals. One can't stop abortions degenerate to petty and frivolous reasons. One can justify abortion on any petty and personal grounds."

Today, we see people being forced to pull the plug on "dying" relatives by the government; we see abortion on demand; what the author of this article finds particularly abhorrent is the aborting of female fetuses on the grounds that a daughter is a shame or an extra burden.

The ugly thicket of issues that surround abortion and other varieties of infanticide are the result of the confluence of various societies refusing to cope with issues raised by sexuality, combined with a basic disrespect for women generally, compounded by a basic disregard for the sanctity of human life.

In the 1970's. a "money for nothing, chicks for free" attitude overtook America and this impelled a drive towards legalized abortion that has lead the United States down a slippery slope of infanticide, eugenics and state sanctioned murder. Apparently, the ability to choose the sex of the prospective infant has led other societies, notably India and China, down a different slippery slope towards the same pit of barbarism.

In 1971, that Catholic prelate was wrong to show off the cross attached to his pasties in a public debate. But I was wrong in my views, also.

For a look at all this from a slightly different perpective, this book review at Blogcritics Magazine might be helpful.

Ruvy:

""In the 1970's. a "money for nothing, chicks for free" attitude overtook America and this impelled a drive towards legalized abortion""

an insult to the folks who pondered over complex issues and pushed for pro-choice (not pro-abortion). Little do do with ideology but with ground realities that were tragic. The fact that Roe vs. Wade might still be over-turned, will not be due to a newly discovered sanctity for life (capital punishment??) but due to the growing power of christian fundamentalists in the USA.

the commonsensical logic is simple: we respect whatever you might choose to believe in but do not impose your morality on others.

It is ironic to see people who support all sort of interventions by the state into private affairs talk of the sanctity of life. The primary pre-requisite for human life is freedom to act on one's thoughts. Without this freedom, the concept of sanctity of life is meaningless. I have written a long post on "Abortion, Female Foeticide and Rights" that addresses these issues in detail.

K.M., your theory makes no sense that the primary pre-requisite for human life is the freedom to act on one's thoughts. Um, so until my daughter reaches an age where she is able to have a thought and make it into action, I should be able to kill her? Or what about when she is two and wants to run into the road or play with fire? Her life is worthless until I let her do it? Or if I take someone into captivity and they are no longer free to act on their thoughts, the sanctity of their life is gone so why not kill them?

You need to seriously think about your theory and more importantly how it is worded. As is, it makes no sense.

People commit crimes because they have some complusions to do so and have freedom to act on their dire compulsions. Compulsions + freedom create a deadly mix that drive some people to extreme recourses.

Murders, foeticide, abortion etc happen because families, couples, individuals as the case may be are exercising their freedom to pursue what they do. State has to intervene to restrict that freedom, because at the other end of knife are innocent lives. Because nobody else would protect those innocent lives, they become a state subject.

smallsquirrel,
Of course I cannot present a complete theory of rights in a comment. I put a link to a long post (more than 1200 words) in my comment that does so in more detail. Do not dismiss my comment on the basis of a couple of sentences.
To add another couple of sentences to address your specific questions
Children have rights because they have the same capacity as adult humans to think and act. The difference is a matter of degree and experience and not of kind. The difference is properly addressed by reducing the scope of rights that children enjoy (such as parental jurisdiction).
With all respect to the commenters here, I do not intend to spend my energies debating the same issue at multiple places. I invite anyone who is interested to read my post and debate it on my blog.

kerty,
A murder is not an exercise of freedom. It is a violation of the victim's freedom. The role of the state is not to restrict anyone's freedom. It is to protect everyone's freedom.

Ruvy:

""In the 1970's. a "money for nothing, chicks for free" attitude overtook America and this impelled a drive towards legalized abortion""

an insult to the folks who pondered over complex issues and pushed for pro-choice (not pro-abortion). Little do do with ideology but with ground realities that were tragic. The fact that Roe vs. Wade might still be over-turned, will not be due to a newly discovered sanctity for life (capital punishment??) but due to the growing power of christian fundamentalists in the USA.

This is the comment of a man who reads only a tiny portion of a long post so that he can bait the writer.

CS, I fought all these issues in the 1980's when the anti-abortion crazies tried to take over the Democratic Farmer Labor Party of Minnesota, of which I was a member. I was on the abortion rights side. I know the issues and the arguments on both sides back and forth and can practically recite them in my sleep.

There is no "common sense" answer to this. As I said in the comment above, "The ugly thicket of issues that surround abortion and other varieties of infanticide are the result of the confluence of various societies refusing to cope with issues raised by sexuality, combined with a basic disrespect for women generally, compounded by a basic disregard for the sanctity of human life."

All this remains true. In the 1970's a cosnsumo-porn mentality began to take over the culture in the United States, and it began the long slow slide towards the barbarism it has reached now. I didn't understand that 27 years ago. I do now, and my own views on abortion have changed as a result.

Yours, by contrast, have not.

Ruvy:

""In the 1970's a cosnsumo-porn mentality began to take over the culture in the United States, and it began the long slow slide towards the barbarism it has reached now.""

That's one way of looking at what happened in the 1960's and 70's.

Another not totally implausible view could also be: the revolt against a wide range of hypocrisies about sexuality and gender relations; the civil rights movement; Rosa Parks; the nation-wide and global revulsion at the unprovoked and beyond blood war in Vietnam and its fall out, the assasination of Dr. King; the assasination of Robert Kennedy; the overall questioning of the so-called moral values that were dominant then; the sorry spectacle of "I am not a crook" Nixon; the award of a Nobel Peace prize to, of all the people, Kissinger etc. etc. One person's "barbarism" could be interpreted as another person's new found freedoms that of course were yet to be smothered by the neo-liberal greed (grab as much as you can, as if there's no tomorrow) you mention, represented by the Enrons, the Haliburtons, but which appeared on the scene much later.

I didn't say anything about what happened in the 1960's in the United States, CS. I didn't talk about Rosa Parks or integration or the attempt of blacks and others in America to achieve some kind of equity in the society they lived in. I talked about the 1970's when all these good things went really wrong, when the fletching of the arrow of reform and change was proven to be faulty and the arrow went off course - and when an attitude of sex without responsibility impelled a drive towards what I thought was a good thing - legalizing abortion.

While I still believe that abortion should be legal, I think it should be monitored far more closely and carefully, and hedged far more about with guarantees for the benefit of both the woman who does not want the child, and the child who otherwise would die.

The consumo-porn culture that presently dominates American culture is a very unhealthy environment for any young woman (or young man, for that matter). And it makes this hedging about abortion difficult as it promotes and "I do the fuck what I want attitude" that negates real community concern for both women and the babies they do not want to (or feel they are unable to) raise.

KM

how do you expect unborn and newborn to protect their freedom on their own against parents bent on terminating their lives?

In order to protect the freedoms, state has to restrict the freedoms that encroach on freedoms of other beings. A state can not protect freedom of everybody without restricting freedoms of few.

Every person including a criminal is merely engaged in exercising his/her freedoms - every action/behavior of a person is but a manifestation of freedoms exercised by that person. Only when moral litmus test is applied that certain freedoms become 'wrong'. Similarly, Only when seen from the prism of state laws that certain freedoms get classified as criminal behaviors.

Ruvy:

""The consumo-porn culture that presently dominates American culture is a very unhealthy environment for any young woman (or young man, for that matter)."'

That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is that the domination of American society by this so-called "consumo-porn" culture is a myth propagated my moral entrepreneurs who thrive on moral panics. An example: anyone who has ever traveled to Japan, will find a thriving "porn" and in-your-face commercial sex industry in literary ever neighbourhood in the big cities. As for "consumption", other countries will find it hard to beat Japan. The atttitude towards sexuality in Japan were never dominated by religious morality like other nations. Yet, it is not exactly a society that is on the brink of falling apart. So, not sure what the causal connection between this and barbarism one is driving at. Just one example. (I suspect what you refer to as "porn" culture is probably nothing more than legit erotica, sexual permisiveness etc. Even there, the US is not even close to many northern european societies, Canada,Japan etc, none of whom are currently wracked by barbarism and imminent self-destruction).