NIKHIL DATAR:

Why are you whiling away your time doing all these things? Don’t you have patients?’ That’s what people tell Nikhil Datar, 54, the gynaecologist who began the battle that eventually pushed India to update its abortion law in 2021. It took 14 years, many court cases and, along the way, he got a law degree too.

Datar, the son of a gynaecologist mother and an awardwinning violinist father, says his activism can sometimes overshadow his day job, though he has a thriving practice in Mumbai’s western suburbs. His contemporaries often don’t understand his passion for justice, but he brushes off the detractors. “Legal activism is not my profession. It is my passion,” he says.

I often wonder why the term ‘pro life’ is used exclusively to describe those who lobby against abortions. Datar is pro life too — he is an advocate of a woman’s right to lead her life on her own terms and make decisions about her body. He believes that a woman must be in charge of her own womb. “As a society, we need to collectively align behind a woman.” As the global debate around autonomy and reproductive health intensifies, it’s a relief to meet a gynaecologist who is pro a woman’s life.

A legal marathon

These days, Datar’s pushing the State government to set up a mechanism to validate living wills, but he’s mainly been a champion of women’s reproductive rights in courtrooms. He fought his first case in the Bombay High Court in 2008 with a woman who wanted an abortion at 24 weeks because her foetus had multiple cardiac complications. The law, not updated since it was introduced in 1971, only allowed abortions until week 20. They lost the case, but Datar appealed and asked that the court consider 24 weeks

“As a society, we need to collectively align behind a woman,” says Nikhil Datar.