Comments on: The Abortion Debate Begins in India.

By: A Friend.

A Friend. — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:37:19 +0000

I followed this from your Twitter.
My idea is, if they had not gone to the court it would have solved their problem (albeit illegally) but some one has to stand up and fight and get an amendment for this kind of problem. So I appreciate this couple for putting up a fight and doing the right thing.

Second, complete heart block can be corrected with a pace maker as long as there are no other associated fatal problems. So if we cannot accept this flaw and want to kill a life, what is to guarantee that we will not abort for even minor things, say because I did not like the profile of my kid in the USG? Unless the child is going to go through lot of quality of life problems, I think we should accept what comes to us.

By: Cuckoo

Cuckoo — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:44:16 +0000

Even I have written on this giving it as a pro-choice. More than the post, the comments have different perspective. And I think we must applaud Mehtas for taking such a difficult & drastic decision because it takes a heart to take such steps. I don’t know what I would have done in a similar situation. Probably I am not that courageous.

I was also of the opinion that it’ll set a precedence and I could almost see female infanticide taking its shelter under it. But then this could have been treated as one of case only.

My argument is when we have so many healthy unwanted newborns who are abandoned or murdered or do not have a place to live and on the other hand we are trying to save a foetus which has not seen the world, has fair chances of being incapacitated and handicapped to survive and most importantly, is not wanted by his/her own parents !!

Thanks for sharing your views on it.

By: Roop Rai

Roop Rai — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:26:18 +0000

fab compilation. more reason why i feel strongly that this case shouldn’t have been discussed at all. some of the stuff on this page, i honestly couldn’t even get the courage to read. just kept imagining myself in Mehtas shoes. just cannot be reading what all is being written.

By: Ten points more on the abortion case « The Brat, the Bean and Bedlam

Ten points more on the abortion case « The Brat, the Bean and Bedlam — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:01:08 +0000

[...] Scan man [...]

By: Healthcare Today

Healthcare Today — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:47:59 +0000

The Abortion Debate Begins in India…

Abortion is “something that has fascinated me since my days in medical college.” That is a direct quote from one of my first serious posts after I started this blog. In that post I had declared; “To us in India, abortion is almost a non-issue.”…

By: the mad momma

the mad momma — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:36:26 +0000

thanks for linking to my post. i’d just like to make a point that i havent made anywhere else yet

- its a sad state when we give people so much credit for being law abiding. abiding by the law doesnt mean the law will rule in your favour. if you have an accident on the road and willing go to court - the court will not set you free without a punishment…

so its sad to see that we’re all so surprised that the mehtas went to court and not to a quack. the law says abortions after 20 weeks are risky for the mother. now naturally if they went to a quack or some shadey alley at this stage they run the risk of losing the mother. …. so they had to go to court and get a decent doctor to abort the baby…

sigh. so many little complications… dont u think?

By: Vijay

Vijay — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:40:21 +0000

What we really need, world wide, are parental screening laws.

Very well said purplesque.

Lekhni: As I said in the very next paragraph, those lines about ‘developed nation’ sound ridiculous to me now. Put that down to wide-eyed overenthusiasm of a new blogger. I probably lost my usual cynical world view for a moment there.

By: Lekhni

Lekhni — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:07:32 +0000

Thanks for the link and the compliments. Thanks also for linking to so many other blog posts, some of which I hadn’t known about. It should be interesting to read what everyone has to say.

I agree with you that it would have been very surprising for the court to have ruled in any other manner. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have wanted Niketa to go to a quack either

I agree the debate is getting acrimonious, but then you should hear the one in the US The worst, of course, was when South Dakota passed a law in 2006 that essentially prohibited abortion even in case of rape And no, I don’t think the US stance has anything to do with being a developed nation, it is in fact based on outmoded religious thinking

By: purplesque

purplesque — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:10:18 +0000

Here’s my two cents on this. We recently admitted a 19 year old who is pregnant for the third time, with a baby whose father she is unsure of. Her other two children are under state custody (because of neglect). She does not want to have this baby, has no intentions of raising it, and even at this point, does not care what happens to the child. I was frankly surprised to learn that we could not set it up for her, that she would have to go to an ‘abortion clinic’ because our hospital will not do non-medical abortions.

What are the alternatives? Have the baby and give it up for adoption? Take a look at the adoption statistics. I would not want to be an orphan child, shuttled from foster home to foster home, unwanted, neglected, abused in a huge percentage of cases, growing up with the odds already stacked up against me.

I was raised in one of the pro-life Indian religions you mentioned, taught that all life is sacred. But here’s the modifier- to be able to have quality of life is sacred, to be able to grow up with a half-decent chance of making it is sacred. And this very argument can be extended to end-of-life care issues, but thats another long debate.

What we really need, world wide, are parental screening laws.