One phrase from her rebuttal is particularly striking: I believe that the history of women can be seen, in some ways, as a history of language. Language, of course, is more than just words – it’s phrasing, intonation and intent as well as vocabulary. The uproar over Trunk’s tweet went well beyond shock that she had reacted with relief to the miscarriage – it was really more about the fact that she had trespassed some code of conduct by which women are expected to speak, or keep silent about, certain things. And even the way we’re expected to feel those things.

What the controversy throws light on is how in spite of many taboos about speaking about personal experience becoming obsolete, how they are discussed can still scandalize and shame the speaker/writer. If Trunk had tweeted, for instance, that she was devastated, or returned after a few tweetless days and sadly and diffidently “confessed” that the miscarriage had put her out of action, it’s almost impossible that such a storm would have brewed. The problem was honesty about an experience, outside the fray of acceptable understandings and acceptable retellings of such experiences.

Nobody is above bias, and we both judge and are judged. I considered what this means in my own life. On the one hand, what this means is that (with big thanks to Eve Ensler) I can say “vagina”, and not have anyone bat an eyelid, but if I say “cunt”, my own preferred word in both conversation and writing, I get nothing but disgusted looks – instantly, my upbringing, intelligence and feminism are questionable. It means that if I ask that someone dismiss my cattiness as PMS, it’s okay, but if I write a poem about how I love the experience of menstruation (as I did some years ago, to horrified reactions), something’s wrong. On the other hand, however, if someone uses the phrase, “that female” to refer to a woman or girl, my hackles get raised, indifferent to the fact that in India, the usage is not derogatory. Similarly, I am sanctimonious about people who define sex in heteronormative or phallocentric terms, in spite of knowing that they may have never been exposed to alternate paradigms of thought.

What about you? How are you limited – whether by your own expectations or by others’ – by the notion of singular ways to experience or express certain things? How does it affect your experiences as, or viewpoints towards, women?

Of relevance is Chimamanda Adichie’s speech about “the dangers of the single story”, which you can watch here.

Miscarriage

A curtain of rain separates
My verandah from the hospital.
On any other day a hundred
Silent patients would pass through
The OP clinic. Each of them
Allowing us doctors to listen
Feel, touch and question them.
The warmth of their fever would
Make us uncomfortably hot.

Today the air is chilled downpour wet.
Water roars in the stony river.
Five nurses, Gi and I sloshed
Through muddy puddles to witness
Our stream in full spate.
Only one desperate couple managed
To make it on the early bus.
Wanting an abortion.

***

M’s Betrayal

When the skin on the bottom of your feet
Burns. Burns really red hot.
It becomes hard and black. Like
Old cracked leather.
It makes a ‘tok tok tok’
Noise like a coconut shell. Dry.

Inside creamy pus waits patiently.
The doctor will soon quit tapping
the skin with his pen.
He will mumble instructions in Tamil.
Nurses will scurry. The woman will
Starve to avoid vomiting with the anaesthesia.

In the evening Dhanam Akka will
Crack open a beautiful glass ampoule.
With the deftness of experience she will
Pull ketamine into a plastic syringe.
M lies on the steel operating table
Softly moaning under her green blindfold.

Soon cold steel clasped in latex
clad fingers will pare through
dead skin. Patient pus will burst
forth and dribble into a plastic
kidney shaped tray. Raw red
flesh will make a shy debut.

Akka, will you promise not to tell
Anyone. Promise on your heart.
Promise on your head. Promise. Promise.
I didn’t fall into a cooking fire
because I fainted being two months pregnant.

I took some tablets because I didn’t
Want a second child right now.
Ten pills from the local doctor. They
They knocked me out and then
Then my husband came home drunk.

Promise you won’t tell anyone. Promise.
On your heart. Promise on your head.
He was in a murderous rage. He.
He tied me up and then he.
He stuffed a cloth in my mouth.

***

Lalit Narayan is a doctor who graduated from St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore in 2007 and then spent two years working at the Tribal Health Initiative, a unique hospital and community health programme staffed by members of the local Malavasi tribal community in the Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu. The poems are based on patients Lalit encountered during his work there. Lalit currently works at the Centre for Public Health and Equity in Bangalore. He blogs at bodypolitics.blogspot.com.

Recently, many American feminists celebrated the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark case that led to the overturning of all laws in the United States that restricted or banned abortion. The new decision came into effect on January 22nd 1973, continues to be a heatedly-argued statute, and has come under threat since. (Do look up Cecilia Fire Thunder for a great example of feminist courage under fire in this issue).

Here in India, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act was enacted in 1971, came into force the following year, and was revised in 1975. Because the law also provides for abortion in the event of contraceptive failure, all pregnancies –- not just those that endanger the health of mother or foetus, or resulting from rape –- can be terminated legally. Technically, any woman above the age of 18 can have an abortion with nobody’s consent but her own and her doctor’s.

When I came across this fact, I was thrilled by how sex-positive and decidedly unpatriarchal it is, and how lucky we are that it is so — but only for a moment. Like several of our laws designed to directly impact the lives of women in ostensibly positive ways, what is real on paper is not nearly as effective in practice. As with laws forbidding dowry or prenatal sex testing, or encouraging panchayat inclusion or girls’ education, such democratic protection when it comes to reproductive rights is not something that translates to the reality of the majority of Indian women’s lives.

Abortion in India has clearly moved beyond the pro-choice/pro-life divide that debates elsewhere continue to pivot on. Legally speaking, India is pro-choice. The overpopulation issue demands it as a practical necessity. But this in itself means that women’s bodies are commoditized as reproductive vessels. From this perspective, women are not seen in their own light as sexual human beings. The reason why abortion is legal in India seems to have very little to do with such a basic, personal right, and everything to do with resources and development.

Like it or not, biology determines that the female bears the brunt of sexual consequence, disease aside — something which many cultures and societies have taken to mean that all female sexuality is consequential, usually for the worse. Unwanted pregnancy is rarely regarded as anything other than a shameful event, a slip of judgment, a symptom of the malaises of society, or at worst, just desserts. That an unwanted pregnancy can be thought of simply as a biological occurrence that thanks to medical technology can safely and quickly be dealt with is unimaginable along these terms. This is not to say that abortion has no emotional bearing, but only that as a visceral and possibly sentimental issue, any woman who has to deal with it goes through enough without the interference of moral guardians.

And moral guardians are one thing we seem to have no dearth of. Ask yourself: when was the last time you heard about an abortion in an Indian context? To be fair, disinclude any distinctly feminist dialogues you had or such literature you read, as well as questions asked in general medical-related situations. Think of a social instance. Can you recall the last time you heard the term not brought up in a hushed whisper, or with a disapproving tone or cluck of the tongue?

Maybe you can. But I can’t.

A 2001 article in The Hindu stated that the reported abortion rate in India is six lakhs per annum. We can assume a significant margin of unreported abortions, because statistics about women rarely paint the whole picture. Imagine that many women under risk had it not been legal and a percentage who surely were forced to have it in unsafe conditions regardless, or had it induced within the home. Despite this, we don’t discuss the issue in any way that really helps.

Ultimately, appropriate legislation is simply not enough to ensure that women are aware of and have access to their reproductive rights. Reproductive rights are not limited to abortion — birth control, childlessness as a choice and sexual health and pleasure are also areas in which a great deal of agency is required before results that reflect either laws or women-centric ideals (which should then be used as the basis for better laws) are achieved. Take for instance the somewhat related issue of rape: can anyone who really understands female sexuality and the power dynamics of rape and assault restrict its definition to penile penetration only? What we need is agency that radicalizes at aintimate, grassroots levels. Agency that occurs via personal interaction, exposure to feminist-sensitive media and exposure to on-the-ground activist work. Agency that doesn’t marginalize sexuality as an aside to reproduction, but regards it at its core.

We’ll know that the law is worth its salt when women can get abortions without being branded sluts, without their entire societal circle finding out, without any consequences but those all surgical procedures come with. And that day seems a long way off yet. Until then, we’ll have to take as our biggest stepping stone the fact that the law, if little else, is on the women’s side.

And finally, for the sake of discourse, I wonder about the question that will be asked when — or if — feminism impacts us enough for us to think of India as a post-feminist nation. If each woman’s reproductive choices should be honoured as her own — can we also honour the choice of a woman who practises sex-selective abortion, not under pressure or threat, but out of her personal desire to not have a daughter? I’m still thinking my answer over.

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