Socio-cultural Practices of Medical Termination of Pregnancy in India
インドにおける人工妊娠中絶の社会文化的実践
MATSUO Mizuho (National Museum of Ethnology)
松尾瑞穂（国立民族学博物館）
The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which people understand andpractice medical termination of pregnancy in their daily lives to understand wider
socio-cultural context of child birth and its loss in contemporary India.
The birth of human beings in India is, as in the case of death, changing its meanings
and practises enormously in recent decades. Childbirth, once embedded in a community andfunctioning as a reproduction of social members has been transformed to be moreindividualised and privatised under ongoing modernization in a neoliberal political economy
system, with development of medical technologies and its invasion of human bodies, anddiversified life strategies. Whether to have children, when, and how many cannot be separated
from the desire, hope, and choice of each actor. But at the same time, this desire and choice ofchildbirth connects much wider bio-politics and socio-cultural politics in pronatalist societies
such as India. Son preference, for example, is one of such phenomenon to be located in theintersection of various politics and intentions.
Growing imbalance between the numbers of boys and girls aged 0-6 years is one of
the major social problems regarding gender and reproductive health in India and muchattention has been focused on the increased prenatal sex determination test and the subsequentsex selective abortion as a background of the imbalanced child sex ratio (108.19 boys per 100
girls in 2011). Demographical studies based on National Family Health Survey (NFHS)
pointed out that the sex ratio of second-order births when the firstborn s a girl, is much lower
comparing with the case when the firstborn is a boy (Jha et al. 2011).
Artificial abortion has long been criminalised in India under the section 312-316 ofIndian Penal Code 1860. When Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP) was issued in1971, it was considered as ‘liberal’ act, especially compare to neighbouring countries in South
Asia as this act allows women to abort the foetus under a broad range of criteria of not only
medical, but economic, social and personal reasons without husband’s consent. The mostcommonly cited national estimates of abortion in India is 6.4 million in 2002, corresponding to1

a rate of 26 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age (Singh et al. 2015). However, there
is an estimate that unsafe abortions outside registered facilities (including medication and othermethods) are about four times higher than abortions obtained at registered facilities, whichleads to estimate a rate of 47.0 abortions (42.2-52.1) per 1000 women (Singh et al. 2018).
Abortion can be said to have one of common women’s reproductive practices in India.
At the same time, it is considered to be a difficult topic for empirical field work as it
belongs to ‘personal and sensitive’ issues in society (Ramachandram and Duggal2007).
Although fertility is praised as quasi-sacred in the tradition of Indian society, controversy
regarding fertility and reproduction such as pregnancy loss, unintended pregnancies within andoutside marriage, sex selective abortion, etc. are treated as something that cannot be told. Howand why women choose artificial abortion is varied, but his paper tries to illustrate each
women’s experiences through the lens of cultural paradigm to structure and reconcile thosechoices.

References
Jha, Prabhat et al. 2011 “Trends in selective abortions of girls in India: analysis of nationally
representative birth histories from 1990 to 2005 and census data from 1991 to 2011”, theLancet vol. 377 (9781), pp.1921-1928.
Ramachandran, V, Duggal, R. 2007 “Preface”, Visaria and Ramachandran (eds.) Abortion inIndia: Ground Realities, London, New York & New Delhi: Routledge.
Sing, Susheela et al. 2015 Abortion & Unintended Pregnancy in Six Indian States: Findingsand Implications for Policies and Programs, Guttmacher Institute.
https://www.guttmacher.org/report/abortion-unintended-pregnancy-six-states-india(accessedJan 26, 2019)
Singh, Susheela et al. 2018 “The incidence of abortion and unintended pregnancy in India,2015”, Lancet Glob Health vol.6, e111-120.
Unnithan-Kumar, Maya. 2005 “Introduction: reproductive agency, medicine and the state”, inUnnithan-Kumar (ed.) Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State: Cultural Transformationsin Childbearing. Berghahn.

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