Maneka's poor conception

Kashmir Times. Dated: 2/8/2016 12:04:23 PM

The union minister's suggestion to go in for sex determination test of all pregnancies is fraught with dangers in Indian soceity

Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi's suggestion to dispense with the Pre Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PNDT) Act and instead make sex determination tests mandatory with complete monitoring of pregnant women is disastrous. Whether it is guided by mischief or by ill-conceived plan to systematize things, it ends up altering whatever little has been achieved through consistent campaigns, pushing for requisite laws and implementation, to check the alarmingly spiraling cases of female foeticide. Maneka Gandhi's view that this would check female infanticide is informed by a poor assessment of the Indian society, where the passion for producing only sons would result in more foeticides, if not infanticides, on the basis of sex. The logic pushed by Maneka Gandhi needs a scrutiny and analysis. She opines that making sex determination tests mandatory and complete monitoring of all pregnancies with a system of prior police permission for all medical termination of pregnancies would check infanticides and keep a check on foeticides on the basis of sex. This dream is based on poor assessment of ground reality. Medical infrastructure across the country is so poor and uneven that it would take decades to ensure that sex determination facility is available at the doorsteps of the entire population. Secondly, who is expected to constantly monitor each case of pregnancy in this vision of making pregnancies and deliveries systematic. Would it be hospitals that are already so overburdened with the number of patients that patient care is already poor? Would it be the police, who are already ill-equipped and inefficient for performing the normal policing beats? Knowing the absolutely corrupt system of medical health care and police, the fate of such a system can be very well imagined.
Paradoxically, the minister's whim is dictated by the logic that it is difficult to track down technicians and doctors violating PNDT. "The moment a woman gets pregnant, we should find out the gender of the child, tell the mother about it, and immediately register it in public records. Then we can track which pregnancies are carried to full term," is what Maneka Gandhi is reported to have said. How does shifting the onus from medical practitioners to women make the women easier to track with existing records? After all, 2.5 crore women are pregnant, on an average in this country; the number is far higher than the doctors and technicians associated with pre-natal diagnostics laboratories. In a system where fewer number of technicians cannot be tracked, how can pregnant women be so efficiently monitored. Leave alone the impracticality of such a system in an absolutely corrupt culture, the very notion of shifting the onus of female foeticides from responsible doctors and health practitioners to the pregnant women is travesty of justice. It is anybody's guess how the pregnancies would be monitored and how the women would be harassed and black-mailed when such sweeping powers are given over individual's rights to the state's functionaries.
The suggestion is repulsive for two main reasons. One it subverts the very campaign against skewed sex ratios, which have shown an improvement in areas where PNDT Act is working successful and awareness about importance of girl child is making some difference. Second, it violates the individual rights of the women, depriving them of their right to their bodies and the right to decide whether they want to be pregnant or not. Such a suggestion and implementation are aimed at interfering with the privacy of women, who do not want to maintain privacy about their pregnancies and whether they want carry on their pregnancies or not. Moreover, it is a choice or health condition of a woman to carry on with the pregnancy or not. Such a move will also amount to take away the right of the women over their bodies in the process. Such policing of women's bodies and their pregnancies is fraught with multiple dangers in a society that is corrupt to the core, patriarchal with institutional bias against women, is illiterate, overall lacks awareness and as yet is not willing to accept girls as equal citizens. Instead of looking at these alternatives from a myopic angle and their own defunct assessment about the rights and conditions of the women in the society, politicians of all hues including Maneka Gandhi need to look into the problems within the society which has contributed in a big way in disturbing the sex ratio and balance in the society and then find a solution. Such a proposal that has sinister proportions must not only be opposed, it must be fought tooth and nail.

 

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