Abortion in India: legal, but not a woman’s right

“I wanted to be sterilised when my second set of twins was born,” says Maina Devi. “But my family said that life in our village is too uncertain for such things.”

Devi is a 25 year old farmer from Jamunipur, a hamlet in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who has two sets of twins under 5 years of age. Her husband refuses to use contraception. She’s not aware that, during her second pregnancy, she could have opted for abortion on the grounds of contraceptive failure. All she does now is pray that she doesn’t get pregnant again.

About 885 miles south, Anusha Pilli, a Hyderabad based medic and public health professional, is struck by the lack of awareness about abortion in the city, even among middle class college graduates. “Few of them know about medical abortion drugs available to them, or about the gestation period up to which abortion is legally allowed in India,” she says. “It’s hard to imagine that Indian law has legally allowed abortion for over 50 years—and still women have not felt empowered by it.”

On International Safe Abortion Day on 28 September 2022, the Supreme Court of India extended the right to legal abortion to 20 weeks’ gestation for all women and to 24 weeks’ gestation under special circumstances.12 With this change, India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act 1971—one of the older abortion laws in the world—also became one of the more progressive.

India’s abortion rate, at 47 per 1000 women …