Abortion laws in India: a review of court cases

Jain, Dipika, Garnaik, Upasana, McBroom, Kerry, Malik, Swati and Tronic, Brian (2016) Abortion laws in India: a review of court cases. Project Report. O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat.

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Abstract

In collaboration with Ipas India, the Centre for Health, Law, Ethics and Technology at Jindal Global Law School presents this report on legal judgments and orders relating to medical termination of pregnancy. This report aims to clarify provisions of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP Act), to highlight contradictions and gaps in the MTP Act and related laws, including the Pre-Conception Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 (PCPNDT Act) and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act, 2012 (POCSO Act), and to examine the implications of the language and legal conclusions in abortion judgments. The report outlines the implications the courts’ decisions have on safe abortion services. It presents findings from the Supreme Court, High Court, District Courts and Consumer Forums up to 2016. The research for this report was conducted using judgements and orders, retrieved from various sources, predominantly Manupatra (a legal database), the national consumer disputes redressal commission website (ncdrc.nic.in), and district court websites. In addition to this, various news articles and stories were also relied upon to get information about the names of parties or case names. The key terms used for this research were “abortion”, “section 312”, “section 313”, “medical negligence”, “consumer protection”, “forced miscarriage”, “consent”, “MTP Act”, “sex determination”, “sex-selective abortion” and “PCPNDT”. Some cases were first found by conducting a legal research on cases related to abortion on indiankanoon.org and then downloaded from the district court website. One of the key limitations of this report is that many of the district court’s judgement are not easily accessible and therefore a complete analysis of all the judgements across the country was not possible. This report has focused mainly on the cases available on the district court websites of the states of Delhi, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala in addition to Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. For other states, like Rajasthan and Gujarat, district court cases were not available on the case databases.

Item Type: Monograph (Project Report)
Keywords: abortion | law | women's rights | courts
Subjects: Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Law and Legal Studies
JGU School/Centre: Jindal Global Law School
Depositing User: Arjun Dinesh
Date Deposited: 07 Jun 2022 18:16
Last Modified: 07 Jun 2022 18:16
URI: https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/3255

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