Docs come to (legal) rescue of women seeking abortion

MUMBAI:AS more women seek the high courts’ permission to get abortions beyond the 20-week legal deadline, more doctors in the state are providing legal aid to petitioners, especially women hailing from small towns.

Chinmay Umarji, a gynaecologist based in Pune, recently helped five women – two from Malwadi, one from Satara, and two from slum areas in Pune – file abortion petitions in the high court.

Umarji said that every month, at least five women come to him who have abnormal foetuses and have crossed the legal deadline for abortion. Of the five, at least three include cases where the foetus has severe anomalies and may not survive beyond a few months after birth.

“These women carry the child throughout the full term of the pregnancy, as there is no awareness about these abnormalities,” Umarji said. He educates these patients and informs them of their legal options, he said. Shantanu Abhyankar, a

gynaecologist practising in Wai, a town near Mahabaleshwar, 260km from Mumbai, has also taken up similar cases. He sees at least two such cases a month. “In cases where women want to take the legal recourse, I collect the reports and email them to advocates in Mumbai,” said Dr Abhyankar.

Prior to this, city-based gynaecologist Nikhil Datar was perhaps the only doctor in the state who provided legal aid in abortion-related cases.

According to Datar, the logistics of travel and finding accommodation in the city is one of the

major factors preventing women from filing petitions in the high court.

Recently, a woman from Sangli who had crossed the 20-week deadline wanted to undergo abortion, but was scared to travel to Mumbai alone, Datar recounted.

“She said that although she had undergone surgery to prevent pregnancies, she got pregnant. We need more doctors at nodal facilities to educate women about the outcomes of abnormal pregnancies, so they are empowered to make correct decisions,” he said.