India legalizes abortion up to 24 weeks for ‘special categories’ of women, including minors

The Medical Termination of Pregnancy (Amendment) Bill 2020 was passed by voice vote in India on Tuesday, March 16, allowing for preborn children up to 24 weeks to be killed in their mothers’ wombs. At 24 weeks, preborn babies are typically about the size of a pomegranate, with their faces formed and eyelashes on their eyelids. They can hear and recognize common sounds, including their parents’ voices. “For infants younger than 22 weeks, the survival rate has improved from 3.6 percent to 20 percent over the last decade, and for those born at 26 weeks, eight in 10 survive,” according to a 2019 report.

This deadly legislation amends the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1971, which had allowed abortion up to 20 weeks. According to the Hindustan Times, the amendment that passed on March 16th, “ensures that women get access to safe and legal abortion services on therapeutic, eugenic, humanitarian grounds.” Eugenics is the practice of targeting and discriminating against certain groups of human beings believed to be inferior or less human. Based on the Hindustan Times’ own proclamation, India isn’t even trying to hide the appalling applications and nature of abortion. 

READ: After 300 million aborted in 47 years, India still looks to increase abortions

Harsh Vardhan, the Union health minister of India, tweeted after the bill was passed, “The bill will protect the dignity and rights of women.” This is a tone-deaf statement, especially in light of the projected millions of missing Indian women and girls who have been targeted and murdered in utero because of their sex. Every abortion kills an innocent child and hurts a woman. Killing innocent human beings through abortion does nothing to protect women’s dignity or rights, and simply treats women’s offspring as mere property.

The bill expands abortion for certain unspecified “special categories of women,” and according to the Hindustan Times, this includes “vulnerable women like differently-abled women and minors.” In other words, it is now legal in India for disabled women and children to decide — or possibly have decided for them — that their potentially viable children, who could survive outside the womb, will be aborted.

As Live Action News reported in 2019, a “global demographic study… found that the world is missing at least 23.1 million females who would otherwise have been born, but fell victim to sex-selective abortion.” India was listed as one of the biggest offenders, with an estimated 10.6 million baby girls killed in a society that favors male children.

India’s new law further enables and supports the gravest human rights violation and deadliest genocide in our world’s history.

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