Legal Factors Mediating Women’s Access To Safe Abortion
- IJLLR Journal
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Deepali Sinha, Research Scholar, CNLU
This paper addresses the factors that influence Registered Medical Practitioners' decisions to assist in or withhold abortion care. We outline the circumstances in which the practitioners exercise decision-making authority with reference to abortions conferred on them by law, as well as the manner in which they exercise this authority.
DECISION-MAKING BY REGISTERED MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS
Section 3(2) of the MTP Act recognizes "danger to the pregnant woman's life or serious injury to her bodily or mental health" as a reason to terminate her pregnancy.1 Additionally, the MTP Act specifies that "in assessing whether the continuation of a pregnancy would pose such a risk to the pregnant woman's health as described in sub-section 2, consideration may be given to the pregnant woman's actual or reasonably foreseeable environment."2 As a result, the Act recognizes that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is not solely a medical one, but also involves a variety of additional social, economic, family, and other circumstances unique to the woman seeking abortion. Despite this acknowledgement, the MTP Act vests the authority to terminate a pregnancy with a registered medical practitioner (RMP) and not the pregnant woman.
Thus, when a woman seeks termination of a pregnancy from an RMP, the RMP retains the option to do so. Women's access to safe abortion is contingent upon the RMP's interpretation of the Act's Section 3 grounds. We discover that this discretion is frequently exercised in ways that have little to do with concerns about the woman's health and well-being, her right to make her own reproductive choices, or even with the MTP Act's legal provisions; and has a great deal to do with providers' fear of personal consequences, their views on the morality of abortion, and their beliefs about women's role and place in society.
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