For all the contrasts that might be drawn between American and Indian politics, one of the sharpest could be the differing role that abortion plays in the two systems. The United States is, of course, famously obsessed with abortion – leading to perennial political brawls when it is time to choose new government officials. In India, on the other hand, politicians appear generally indifferent to the subject. Why is this so?
This Indian apathy or ambivalence towards abortion holds true through the pre- and post-Independence period till the present day. During the colonial period, discussions of abortion appeared occasionally in the writings of Indian social critics, but only in order to draw attention to its perceived relation with a social 'evil'. Tarabai Shinde, the late-19th century Marathi woman who rallied against gender norms, cited abortion as evidence of men's hypocritical sexual moralities. Another Marathi writer, the iconoclast and educationalist Jotirao Phule, viewed abortion as an outcome of unjust gender and caste practices. "These [widower] Arya brahmans unashamedly make advances on the weak defenceless widows in their household and greedily seduce them," he wrote. "When these widows become pregnant they are forced to abort. This is quite a common practice." Vidyasagar, a contemporary of Phule's in Bengal, voiced similar complaints. However, while identifying abortion with some social problem, these writers and other public intellectuals of their time seem to have done little to explore the morality concerning the subject, or whether a foetus should be considered 'alive'.
Modern Indian law is based on the colonial Indian Penal Code (IPC), originally drafted in 1837 and enacted in the early-1860s. After 1947, IPC sections 312-316 remained in effect, which detailed criminal penalties and terms of imprisonment for both persons who perform and women who receive abortions. But in 1971, the Indian Parliament passed the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) bill, which effectively legalised abortion by creating loopholes in the event of birth control failure or maternal mental distress. Government records suggest that this shift in the abortion legal framework came about in response to legal trends in other countries and, more importantly, from concerns about overpopulation.
In any event, comments by several members of Parliament at the time indicated that there had been little legal enforcement of abortion penalties for decades and that the 1971 change in policy was fairly uncontroversial. One parliamentarian cited the figure of 6.5 million annual abortions in India in the years leading up to the law's amendment. A member of the Rajya Sabha lamented that the bill had "not received the publicity it deserves." Indeed, although committees in both houses had mulled the legislation's provisions since its 1969 introduction, the Rajya Sabha debated the MTP bill for only two days and the Lok Sabha for only one.