Having said that, the responsibility for the child lies with the creators of the child and therefore, people who are in favour of abortion should realize that they are being irresponsible if they give into their instincts without thinking about the consequences of their actions. It is easier to perpetrate the idea that sex for pleasure is alright in a country like America, whose culture is a young one. In India, where the culture is as old as civilization itself, this is rather more difficult. The traditionalists in the USA rebel against the scientific institutions and the organizations which are pro-abortion, because the US allows free speech.

I believe that part of the reason Indians are discussing these issues (apart from the sexual revolution) is that the Indian mind is now more attuned than ever to issues facing the United states, which air on its television channels or its mass media.

A country like India, on an economic, rather than on an ethical level should probably consent to abortions, provided they are done in accordance with a well defined, just and scientific law.

Really? What realities would these be? How easy do you think it is to make nurses in government hospitals behave more sensitively towards patients? How exactly would you go about doing this? And do you really think training is all that is required to make someone who thinks abortions are wrong not say so? I’d think you’d need evaluations, incentives – the whole works. Any ideas on how you would measure this behavior for performance appraisals, or what incentives you could offer within the government system? Any examples of initiatives within the Indian public health system that have actually succeeded in doing this? If it’s easily achievable someone must have done it, no? In the fight against HIV (to use your example) we don’t sit around hoping that government hospital employees will become more sensitive and start telling people more about AIDS. We set up private non-profit institutions that go out and spread awareness and provide support to people at risk.

As for your second point, I’m not sure what the logical connection there is. The point that legal rights may be meaningless without economic empowerment is well taken – it doesn’t help to have a law allowing women to have abortions if the majority of them can’t afford one. I agree entirely that the availability of safe, affordable abortions is an important issue. It may even be more important than all this social censure of unmarried women we’ve been talking about in this discussion thread. But I’m not sure how you got from that to the attitude of the care-provider. Are you saying that care-providers in public clinics are more likely to be insensitive than those in private clinics?

And which do you think is the more realistic and practical way to save all these “young already fragile minds” who are driven to “dangerous decisions where they try to take their life”? Protecting them from all possible disapproval by somehow magically making everyone respect their choices and not express their strongly felt disapproval, or creating institutions and non-profit organizations that will provide support and counseling to these women so they can navigate these decisions more easily. I pick the latter. You’re free to choose whatever you think will work.

Why? Because caregivers cannot afford to be stupid.People can cluck away all they like when they are your neighbour but professionally it won’t work. Sensitization enforced as part of training is easily achievable in certain realities than say empowerment and a long-drawn engagement working towards changing individual’s minds. In the fight against HIV people don’t just go about engaging people to instantly
stop using drugs/needles but give them needle packs.

I think the answer to some of the other why’s is that hardly 20% of the providers are public sector and the rest is privately owned clinics/practices. So where does this huge chunk of population who cannot afford to pay the money but need a procedure go? To an unsafe place. Sure, this is not to say empowerment and the decisionmaking process etc is not achievable
but we are sitting here and making a hundred assumptions that stem from priveleges of who we are in terms of education, social power,mobility, money. I am talking of this huge gap between the intellectualization in the urban intelligentsia and
ground realities of the grassroot level where basic needs come first! A lot happens across primary health centers, Government hospitals that a great many of us are blissfully aware of. There are instances of apathy and scorn in medical care do drive young already fragile minds to dangerous decisions where they try to take their life. And that is why it matters what a stupid care-provider says.

As I say in my earlier comment, I may have misunderstood what Sharanya was originally saying. I was focusing on the paragraph that talked about how abortion was not a topic for discussion. To me, “hushed whispers, disapproving tone of voice and cluck of tongue” signals silence, or a reluctance to talk about something in public. It certainly does not suggest that women are being routinely maligned as being ‘loose women’ or that women’s reputations are being threatened by tales of mutliple abortions. If that was what Sharanya was really saying I wish she’d said so in her post, or in her first response – it would have made things clearer and avoided a lot of misunderstanding. I suppose for someone who knew the milieu Sharanya was talking about intimately it would have been clear that’s what she really meant – it certainly wasn’t to me (or from Preeta’s comment, to her). My interpretation was that all Sharanya was saying was that it wasn’t an easy or common topic of conversation.

Given that interpretation, my first comment simply tried to make the point that the fact that abortions aren’t easy to talk about / aren’t commonly talked about doesn’t imply that people disapprove of them. Which made me wonder whether Sharanya (and others) weren’t reading too much into this silence. Once she finally made it clear that she wasn’t talking about silence / abortion not being an easy topic of conversation, but was actually talking about a consistent and malign pattern of attacks on women for having abortions, I agreed that that was wrong.

You’re right that I probably overreacted a little. I apologize. But I’m still not sure why Sharanya couldn’t have simply clarified that she wasn’t talking about silence surrounding abortion and was talking about more active harassment, instead of taking us both on a wild good chase over ‘casualness’ and then needlessly attacking me for espousing points of view I’ve never supported.

Anindita: Yes, of course, if a woman brought it up then it would be a valid topic for discussion. My point was / is simply that if the topic doesn’t come up in discussion then it could be because most women don’t want to talk about it, for reasons that don’t have to come from fear of social censure but could come from an unwillingness to talk about an unpleasant experience. Therefore the fact that abortion does not get talked about commonly in society (if true) does not necessarily imply that social disapproval exists. Anyway, all that’s irrelevant since Sharanya apparently wasn’t saying that there’s silence around abortions anyway.

Regarding the second part of your comment – as I say in the post on my blog, I agree entirely that women should have the right to choose, and to the extent that their choices are limited by social censure that’s an issue. But the solution to that is not simply to wish social censure away. The problem is not that people disapprove, the problem is that social disapproval has force and is able to keep women from making choices they’d like to make. Why does the fact that society disapproves need to mean that women hide and sneak and feel criminal? Why does it matter what some stupid care-giver in a hospital says? There are lots of things that men do that society disapproves of, but it doesn’t stop them from doing them anyway. Obviously, there are good reasons why women are more vulnerable to social disapproval – reasons grounded in patriarchal institutions – but those are precisely the reasons we need to be going after. It’s the seeming acceptance of everyone on this discussion thread that women simply have to remain hostage to social approval and that it’s society’s perspective that we need to change, that I object to.

The real issue here, according to me, is not the vocal disapproval of some sections of society, but the lack of empowerment of women to fight back against this disapproval, and the invisibility of those (and I remain unconvinced about disapproval of abortion being as widespread as it seems to be) who approve of a woman’s right to choose. What we should be working towards is a world where women are sufficiently empowered to be able to resist and ignore this disapproval, where we create abortion support groups or other institutional mechanisms to ensure that women who choose to have abortions get vocal and critical support. Not a world where those who have strong beliefs against abortion have been somehow magically muzzled but a world where we’re able to tell them where they get off. To me, that world is both better and more credible than one where everyone’s fakely polite to everyone else.

None of which is to say that we shouldn’t also try to fight against the disapproval. By all means let’s try and change people’s minds about abortion. In order to fight the disapproval, though, you need to engage with it, examine where it comes from, be willing to discuss and debate it. And you need to provide reasons why the disapproval is not valid, not just reasons why people should keep their disapproval to themselves. Which is why starting by saying, effectively, that it’s okay if you disapprove of / condemn abortion is disingenuous. What we should be saying is – it’s NOT ok if you condemn abortion. If you disapprove of it, let’s talk about why you think it’s wrong. And having said that, we need to listen to what the other side says and provide rebuttals of what they’re saying. Not simply dismiss all their (strongly held) beliefs and opinions as “social, religious and pseudo-ethical prejudices and expectations”. That won’t get us anywhere.

Unwanted pregnancy is often viewed as a ‘punishment’ for ‘sinning’.

“I’m entirely supportive of a woman’s right to have an abortion if she chooses, but I’d never bring up the topic with someone who had had an abortion, not because I disapprove of her choice, but because I recognize that it’s likely to be an emotional subject that it would be insensitive to raise. You wouldn’t discuss a former soldier’s war experiences with him / her, would you? That doesn’t mean you disapprove of his / her having fought in the war.”

Yes, but what about if the woman brought it up? Perhaps, because she wanted to talk about it? Perhaps, because she needed to? What if the woman herself had conflicting feelings about it? Why should she have to remain silent because it’s uncomfortable for you because you have decided it is a sensitive topic. By your own admission, the trauma (if any), and the experience in any case, has been hers. So shouldn’t it be up to her to decide what and how much should be talked about?

You said death is an uncomfortable topic. But we would hardly shush someone if they talked about the death of a loved one. When it comes to abortion, however, most women in India do not have the space or the choice to talk about it — at all. Even among close friends, they would feel scared of what the reaction would be. I don’t think Sharanya’s saying that we should be sitting around over coffee discussing it casually like say, ‘what movie should we watch today?’. Rather that it should be okay to talk about it like we would talk about other life experiences — such as death.

I don’t think she’s espousing that it become ‘casual’ as in flippant. As you rightly pointed out, as long something is about life and death, it can never be. But that it be accepted as something that happens, quite often.

You have said that the silence is linked to grief rather than social disapproval. I must firmly disagree. I don’t how it is where you are, but in India, a woman fears social ostracism if people ‘get to know’ that she has had an abortion. For people who are going through post trauma stress syndrome (and I have known such cases closely), it is harder to fight through this because they also can’t talk about it or even let on that something is wrong. The guilt she feels about the act gets mixed up with the guilt induced by society (‘everyone thinks it’s dastardly so i must be a horrible person’) and it gets hard for the person to differentiate between the two after a while. This makes coping even more difficult.

Should people be allowed to voice disapproval? Yes, of course. But aren’t there many areas in which one must try to fight the atmosphere of disapproval in the first place? What about homophobia? What about disapproval of a woman’s right to wear what she wants, walk on the streets at night, marry when she wants? Can we stop people from disapproving of these things? No. But shouldn’t we try to voice why this disapproval is unnecessary and out of line?

Ultimately, it boils down to the question of is a woman’s body her own or not? If one agrees that it is, then she should have the right to exercise choices with regard to it. Being given such a choice legally becomes a little futile when society refuses to support it — and she has to hide and sneak and feel like a criminal anyway.

Like Vidya points out: I have heard of cases of censure or strong opinions come from care givers (nurses , post-operative care) after a woman has undergone a rather painful and stressful decision. (physically,mentally and emotionally) . Reasons , Politics and choices of whether she does our of her own volition, or situation is another issue but there is a need for a certain change in humanitarian attitude on this.

I think that’s what Sharanya is asking for — an attitude of understanding rather than one of censure.

Vidya: That makes me think of what HIV positive people often face even in hospitals. And that’s why they often keep it a secret — again with devastating results.