Context: Recently, WHO has released more than 50 recommendations that include clinical practice, health care delivery and law and policy interventions to support quality abortion care.

Need of new guidelines

• To prevent more than 25 million unsafe abortions annually.
• Developing countries bear the burden of 97 per cent of unsafe abortions.
• The proportion of abortions that are unsafe is significantly higher in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws.
• Abortion is one of the leading causes of maternal death in low- and middle-income countries.
• Lack of access to safe, timely, affordable and respectful abortion care is a critical public health and human rights issue.

Key Highlights of the new guidelines

• It includes recommendations on many simple interventions at the primary care level that improve the quality of abortion care.
• It includes recommendations for the use of telemedicine, which helped support access to abortion and family planning services.
• It also recommends removing medically unnecessary political barriers to safe abortion.

Factors Influencing Abortion

• Individual reasons:  marital status, victim of rape or incest, economic independence and education level.
• Interpersonal factors: parental support and partner support.
• Societal determinants: social norms, religion, the stigma of premarital and extra-marital sex, adolescents’ status, and autonomy within society.
• Organizational level: existence of sex education, the health care system, and abortion laws

Abortion as a Human Right

• Right to have an abortion is a woman's individual rights, right to her life, to her liberty, and to the pursuit of her happiness.
• Reproductive rights are internationally recognized as critical both to advancing women's human rights and to promoting development.
• Each and every woman has an absolute right to have control over her body, most often known as bodily rights.

Relevant Indian laws

• Indian law legalises abortion under certain circumstances.
• Till 1971, Indian Penal Code provided for the provision of abortion in India.
• Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act- Right of Women in India to terminate an unintended pregnancy.
• Literature: Abortion is severely condemned in Vedic, Upanishadic, the later puranic (old) and smriti literature.
• Code of Ethics of the Medical Council maintains utmost respect for human life from the time of conception.
• Constitution: Article 21 entails right to privacy and right to abortion.

Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) amendment act 2021

• It allows a registered medical provider to provide abortion services to a woman as part of reproductive rights and gender justice.
• Not all pregnancies could be terminated.

Section 3 of the Act says that pregnancy can be terminated:

• If there is danger to the life or risk to physical or mental health of the women;
• Humanitarian grounds: Pregnancy arises from a sex crime like rape or incest, etc.
• Eugenic grounds: child, if born, would suffer from deformities and diseases.

By: Shubham Tiwari