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Here’s Niketa Mehta!
By Anisha Bhaduri
What a mother can do, a court does better. And, what should not be is done without remorse on prime time television ~ a mother-to-be gets a media trial. Hours after Bombay High Court rejected the plea of a woman pregnant with a 26-week-old foetus seeking its medical termination, microphones are out and commentators are drooling. So what if Rajesh Talwar was a big, bad mistake, albeit the lapse driven home belatedly, here’s Niketa Mehta. Hallelujah!
Niketa comes to know in the twenty-fourth week of her pregnancy that the foetus may be born with a congenital heart defect which may make it impossible for the child to have a normal life and even cause its death. Niketa moves Bombay High Court seeking a medical termination of pregnancy since her child was likely to need a pacemaker right from the time of birth and the quality of its life would be poor. She also seeks an amendment to a section of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, 1971, which states a foetus can be aborted after 20 weeks only if there is a fatal risk to the mother, but not to the foetus.
The High Court rejects Niketa’s plea because it feels that medical experts entrusted by it to evaluate the condition of the foetus do not express any “categorical opinion that if the child is born it would suffer from serious handicaps”.
And, as we sit down to dinner with our children, television commentators and their assorted opinion vendors comprising doctors, activists, people with disability and without, and invariably all of them parents, tell us, so what if not in so many words, look there’s a mother who needs a court to tell her that she should give birth no matter what state of health her foetus enjoys. Someone tells us Niketa needs counseling. Someone else that she is the representative of that section of Indians which has a pathological distaste for disability. Cameras focus relentlessly on a weary woman shuffling her way down the court’s compound, even linger a second or two on her tummy, suggestive of, as it were, the baby of contention.
Niketa may or may not know that doctors, including possibly the staunchest pro-life champion in UK at the moment, Professor Stuart Campbell, cite a study at University College Hospital that found 72 per cent of babies born at 24 weeks survive. The Abortion Act of UK amended in 1990, put 24 weeks as the upper limit for legal abortions. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Prof Campbell writes, “at that time, a baby born at 23 weeks had less than a 10 per cent chance of survival. Now, it has a 66 per cent chance and we must change the law again”. He wants the maximum age for abortion to be cut to 18 weeks.
Niketa also may or may not be aware of the seminal Roe v. Wade judgment passed by the United States Supreme Court in 1973 that made abortion eventually legal in the country. The central premise of Roe v. Wade was that abortions are permissible for any reason a mother chooses, up to the “point at which the foetus becomes ‘viable’ “, viability being defined as being in possession of the potential to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with life support. In the USA, a foetus is seen as viable “at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks”. The US Supreme Court, much like the Indian MTP Act, “also held that abortion after viability must be available when needed to protect a woman’s health”.
But that’s not the point.
By dissecting Niketa Mehta and her predicament, prime time television is telling us it’s all right to discuss a woman, any woman, who’s not a celebrity and who’s about to have a baby, just because she has chosen to bring herself to the public domain by exercising her right to seek judicial intervention in a, literally, life-or-death matter for her. And, that it’s perfectly all right to be judgmental.
We have heard of maternal ambivalence ~ college-educated, well-paid women debating the point of bringing more life into this bad, bad world and wondered if women’s lib finally found its way to poor, poor India where female foeticide is a way of life. We saw our college-educated, working mothers manacled to the cooking oven and worrying themselves sick about us and thought: Wow! If you could have a choice about (not) procreating, you were in control. But the instant a very-pregnant Niketa Mehta pervades our TV screens demanding to be understood, our ambivalence vanishes. Our parents tell us sitting in judgement is bad; prime time television, our modern-day, self-appointed moral arbiter, tells us it’s not. And, we want to trust the TV more than we trust out parents.
There is nothing wrong with parenthood, we all like our parents. Social animals that we are, we also find nothing wrong with the systemic human progression ~ birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, death. It’s only when we start debating whether a woman should or should not look good, should or should not marry, should or should not have babies, or even should or should not move courts to keep or not to keep her baby, that we dismiss maturity to extend our adolescence.
In Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court pointed out that most laws against abortion in that country violated a constituional right to privacy. In our delirious suspension of maturity, we forget that privacy is sacrosanct. When Niketa Mehta moved Bombay High Court, she was fighting for as much privacy for herself as for her unborn child. The privacy of a mother to try and do the best for her child. The privacy of a foetus to live or die without debility.
What a mother can do, a court does better. And, sooner TV channels know it, the better.
(The writer is Deputy News Editor, The Statesman, Kolkata)
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