Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971

The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 provides for the termination of certain pregnancies by registered Medical Practitioners. It is possible to get an abortion under the Act if pregnancy is under 20 weeks.
However, it is subject to several conditions and conducting an abortion without fulfilling the conditions is considered a crime.

Under the MTP Act, the doctor can perform an abortion in the following situations:

If the pregnancy would be harmful to life or physical or mental health of the pregnant woman;
If there is a good chance that the child would suffer from physical or mental abnormalities which would leave him or her seriously handicapped.

Legal and medical experts feel that a revision of the legal limit for abortion is long overdue.
Foetal abnormalities show up only by 18 weeks, so just a two-week window after that is too small for the would-be parents to take the difficult call on whether to keep their baby and for the medical practitioner to exhaust all possible options before advising the patient to take the extreme step.
Since lack of legal approval does not prevent abortions from being carried out beyond 20 weeks, women are put under risk since the abortions then are often conducted in unhygienic conditions by untrained, unqualified persons. It is estimated that about 8% of maternal deaths happen due to unsafe abortions.

Last year, the Union Cabinet approved the MTP (Amendment) Bill, 2020, which allows abortion up to 24 weeks of gestational age for vulnerable categories of women and there is no limit of gestational age in case of pregnancies with substantial foetal abnormalities, diagnosed by a medical board.

The Kerala High Court has allowed seven minor girls, the youngest one aged 13 years, who became pregnant after being raped were allowed to terminate their pregnancies during the past six months.
The High Court cleared the petitions filed by the mothers of the victims as judicial permission was required for initiating Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) in cases of advanced stages of pregnancy.
Two victims, aged 14 and 16, were into their 23rd week of pregnancy, while the 13-year-old was 21 weeks pregnant, when their cases came up before the courts.

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