Excerpt from

3 October 2002

All rights reserved to The Himalayan Times
Women’s right to abort
Prakash Dahal
The abortionists will no longer need to dread law or cover up the embryo and fetus eliminating trade. Neither will they need to camouflage the 'sinful but lucrative' abortion to elude the lax law and pliant authorities.
The National Civil Code pending has got the royal assent. And, that might escalate fetal killings. All they need is to tell the authorities, if they poke around, that the woman aborted is a rape or incest victim.
Most of them will discreetly prefer the former because a case of incest involves tough grilling from the authorities and the victim likely to succumb. However, abortion under rape provision is risk-free. In this case, the woman is not obliged to know who inseminated her. Neither can the authority come down harshly on her to dig up the name of the perpetrator of the crime. A woman can walk in and demand abortion against rape.
The Code gives considerable amount of 'discretionary power' to the men and women in white gown. Health workers licensed to abort women can do so in 'good faith'. Doctors acting in 'good faith' may prove as good as benevolent dictators above law. But then, the question is, if a worse democracy can be bartered away for benevolent dictatorship! The answer would certainly be a roaring 'No'.
The reason! Absolute power perverts absolutely.
The National Civil Code providing for the abortion rights to women allows couples to delete 12 weeks' pregnancy normally and, 18 weeks if deemed hazardous to woman's health. The bill seeking amendment to the National Civil Code lingered erupting in nagging suspicion for a complete four years, many fearing it would wreak havoc to Hindu social values. Political parties balked at it, while feminists and women rightists clamoured for the same.
Politicians gave in calculating the harm that the infuriated women might bring to them at polls. Women activists, on the other hand, remained steadfast in the campaign blasting what they called women-hostile laws that throw women behind the bars for crimes that men commit.
Once brought into force, the law has raised a few questions. Will it right women's wrongs or wrong women's rights in a country where women rarely decide to bear or not to bear a child? Will it serve them in the Kingdom where husband's quest for a son dehumanizes them reducing them to a child-bearing machine?
What if by means of amniocentesis they detect the sex of the fetus and terminate the female?
Moreover, in a society where values are frighteningly wearing away and no cohesive force as such exists to hold society, will this radical right be able to check abuse and perversion that are feared to gush in along with them?
One may be tempted to ask if the abortion rights to women will benefit the likes of women languishing in jail on charges of infanticide or illegal abortion? Or, is it meant to serve the handful urban high-flyers who are exercising these rights even without having them legally?
No urban woman is found thrown behind the bar for this felongy though rural women have to bear it.
One finds hundreds of women from the rural areas jailed for abortion and infanticide, but not a single city dweller. This may lead one to wrongly conclude that rural women are barbaric, immoral, unethical and sinful and the urban pious, chaste, civil and moral?
Two reasons remain responsible for it. One, plenty of loopholes lay for urban criminals to get around it. Two, law enforcing agents and the agency have always been malleable.
What was missing with the rural women was economic and social power to get around the law. In fact, neither had legal power but urban women could escape the legal noose which invariably fell around rural women's neck.
Here comes the question, whether it is the law that governs or the power that can turn and twist the laws? If it is the latter, then the law is bound to plague society with ills that come along with the abortion rights. But, if it is the former, then the feminists may be right. The hopes, however, runs at a low ebb.