BY NEELAM CHAUDHARY

Every women in this world has the right to choose what is best for her body. Our rights to abortion should never be questioned. However, how many women in today’s time opt for abortions due to other underlying issues. And yet, again society creeps into the picture.

Women of color belong to communities and societies that still expect male heirs. We blessed each other saying, ” We pray to God you will have a boy”. But why ? What does it matter if the child is a boy or girl . It does not matter to me, its my body and yet I will dance to your tunes to feel accepted.

The Law :

The national pre conception and pre natal diagnostics techniques Act of 1994, banned the sex-selective abortion in India. This policy was implemented in 1996 in India. This implies that India has banned the use of medical technology to determine the sex of fetuses to selectively abort girls. The implementation of policy doesn’t seem to have any effect on anyone’s poor mentality. Sex selective abortions continue to happen. This is because “policy has nothing to do with our family”.

It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

Mother Theresa

What is annoying is that there are laws in place for things that should not even need to be a law. Instead of celebrating human life, we choose to become murderers. Our choices are all based off how expensive it is to raise a girl child. How she will never carry forth the family name. How she will anyways leave the house. Let’s not even start with the concept of dowry or how we have to appease the boys families with so called gifts.

Still Prevailing ..

A 40 year old woman living in Mumbai’s Dadar, was allegedly forced to abort 8 times
by her husband. Along with this she was given over 1500 steroids, so that she can
produce a male child.

So how did the law allows this ? Well, here is where the saying ” where there is a will there’s a way ” comes into the picture.

WELL AWARE that such testing could not be done in India, the woman has alleged that the test and medications were all given and done abroad. So despite, laws in place it did not deter this man and his family from subjugating his wife to abortions against her consent.

Education, family background, awareness all mean nothing when it comes to the medieval thinking our society remains stuck in. We live in a time when women have reached heights like no other. We hail from a country where women have ruled the country at one time. Not to mention the other spheres of life where women have done and achieved so much.

Yet, “who will our property go to” , “why waste time on educating her”, “how will we pay dowry” still fill our lower class, middle class and upper class family minds.

Our girls are not a burden, we are not the burden. Its is our society which proceeds to burden us and then call us a burden. That’s the plight, a plight where a woman has no reproductive rights and she remains vulnerable to society’s evils. It is not our country that is subjugating us, it’s our society and what we have made of it that continues to drive us into submission and discrimination.

No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.

Magaret Sanger