Abortion Is A Legal Right For Unmarried Pregnant Women: The Supreme Court Pronounces
Finally, The Right Thing Done!
The Supreme Court ruled that unmarried and single women can now have safe, legal abortions up to 24 weeks, saying that every woman has the right to make her own decisions about her body without interference from the government.
Recently, this draconian 51-year-old abortion regulation that forbade unmarried women to terminate pregnancies up to 24 weeks was loosened by a bench headed by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud. Abortions performed by medical professionals for unmarried women between 20 and 24 weeks pregnant was illegal under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1971 and its Rules of 2003.
According to the court’s decision, it violated the right to equality before the law and equal protection to offer abortion care to unmarried women who were also between 20 and 24 weeks pregnant (Article 14). This was because they were not entitled to the same level of care.
So far, some realism has selectively bitten many!
I take pleasure in appropriating women’s intellects and purportedly passing them off as my own. Simply put, women have superior intelligence. Having seen an unmarried woman who had something to talk about only to have it completely rejected, I was struck by a man’s one right message, and also by a married pregnant woman’s, which they delivered to roaring acclaim a few minutes later. The rejection before that was sheer discriminatory just because it was from an “unmarried pregnant woman”. The heckles kept following. I wonder if it’s still the 21st century podium the single pregnant woman was addressing, or some obscurantist, blinkered, insular goblins that played the audience in the guise of the “so-called” superficially attired spectral entities to look urbane? Okay, I’m going to take the broseph and steal some stupefyingly shrewd concepts from this part and put them right into this article. Don’t mistake it for a “Devil’s Advocate” at play!
Are we hoping for a
revolutionary, overwhelming and pulsating discourse from a Bollywood flick to
take place? Bummer! No, not at all! It was all preposterously the opposite.
To the best of my memory, the few thousand I ever spent witnessing this gargantuan, deliriously peevish face-off wasn’t worth any appreciation though, but definitely, it was an eye-opening disillusionment, and a completely enlightened reprieve from the penchant for farce, hitting with a flotilla of images of ostensibly shallow semblance of modernism or token diatribe of civilisation.
So, the “what if…” that they’d just been experiencing problems in general surfaced. What if, instead of waving and frowning, she, the married “pregnant woman,” waved and smiled, hoping to acclimate the unmarried pregnant woman to the concept of smiles written backwards? You have learnt the totally unwarranted opinion on humankind – hopefully, by now.
Unfortunately, the events of today have taken their toll on these individual characters. Two people, mom and dad – the familiarized, general duo, believed to be ideal, helped bring in the groceries from supermarkets, beheld with ample dignity, and each of them had a supposedly legitimate approval and an insatiable appetite for arguing, if otherwise, if that looks a little different.
Imagine the scene swapped by a single pregnant woman doing the same at the supermarket, obviously, shopping-would there be snickers and murmured chagrins to revile her to discomfiture? To her, it all looks like an alligator’s abominably wide-open mouth, eagerly waiting, whetting its appetite, to guzzle her down its incessantly bellowing stomach. Undoubtedly, the unuttered mortification, garbling minds, peevishly staring, and stealthily resonating debaucheries, will massacre her unarmed. Why is it such a public scorn? Believe me, this isn’t some trite folklore from the past!
Why is it so different for an unmarried or single pregnant mother? Obviously, the ignominy is not entailed by the man who indulged in the act with as much vigour and verve as was equally responsible. Can only men in those categories and married women fructify the checklist of all the privileges and win the right to live? More than the act, it’s the vexation of gossip that tends to be all the more dunked and indulged in, unabashedly, recklessly, and devoid of responsibility.
I am waiting with bated breath now to learn what the experts think about the Supreme Court’s decision to ensure that all women, whether married or not, have access to abortion.
Most definitely, it’s a landmark decision—the Supreme Court has eliminated a barrier that has been in place for 51 years, granting unmarried women access to abortion. Precisely, we got it right; the ban was overturned by the Supreme Court. Unmarried women now have the same access to abortion as a right as married woman.
The Supreme Court that handed down the verdict ruled it was unconstitutional to treat unmarried women with the same gestational phase, i.e., up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, as married women differently only because they are unmarried.
According to Justice Chandrachud’s ruling, “the rights of reproductive autonomy, dignity, and privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution give an unmarried woman the right of choice as to whether or not to bear a child on a similar footing as that of a married woman.”
The court concluded that a married woman who became pregnant might have experienced the same “change in material circumstances” as an unmarried woman. She could have been left financially or emotionally alone during her pregnancy.
Do you recall?
A societal stigma is attached to being a single mother, according to Nagpur HC.
The Nagpur High Court approved the legal termination of a 22-week pregnancy in 2019.
According to the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, “in India a child to an unwed mother is viewed as a social disgrace of a severe character and she does not want to endure such shame for the rest of her life.” A man had promised to marry a girl, and she became pregnant as a consequence.
A 25-year-old woman from Chandrapur filed a criminal suit asking Justices P.N. Deshmukh and Pushpa Ganediwala to let her have an abortion 22 weeks into her pregnancy.
The woman, a recent college graduate studying business in preparation for competitive examinations, fell in love with a man when the two crossed paths on Instagram in 2017. He had sexual relations with her on the premise of their engagement. He promised to marry her when she became pregnant, but then he stopped returning her calls and they split up as the pregnancy progressed.
Soon after, she filed a First Information Report (FIR) against the man for violating Section 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code.
The court said that there was no doubt that the unwed mother was pregnant and that, after reading the report from the Chandrapur medical board, she felt betrayed by her ex-lover.
Section 3 of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act says, “If the pregnant woman claims that the pregnancy was caused by rape, the pain of the pregnancy will be seen as a significant impairment to her mental health.”
A child born to an unwed woman in India is considered a social disgrace of significant character, and the court ruled that the mother did not want to live with that stigma. Neither the petitioner nor her unborn child would benefit from this course of action, in their professional opinion. The court said that the plaintiff had a right to reproductive autonomy under the Constitution of India because not giving her that right would violate her right to life, liberty, and human dignity and make her social and marital life harder in the future.
In addition, the court said that the complainant may legally place the child for adoption if she does not want the child anymore, according to the Juvenile Justice Act.
The Central Adoption Resource Authority’s protocol requires that her identity be concealed indefinitely and that neither she nor the adopted kid be permitted to meet. Additionally, the court ruled that the kid would never be told either parent’s identity.
In any case, what could possibly have prompted this piece of writing? We’ve reached the limits of our predisposed, humdrum yet replete with creativity to sneer them either to death or to crumble incognito, as the consequences may seem. Instead of chickening out of the situation, it was perhaps decided by the extra-terrestrials to overturn the picture to empower single, unmarried women. The depiction is finally complete. Of course, a reprieve for all of them, with equal rights.
The turmoil tends to be unsolicited and the trauma is despicably endless for them. Now, the sun is much brighter.
Archives & Sources:
https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/supreme-court-women-abortion-ruling-8181347/
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/being-an-unwed-mother-a-social-stigma-says-hc/article28112305.ece
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