Mumbai (AsiaNews) – The number of abortions in Mumbai rose by 10 per cent last year, the highest increase in the past seven years. Figures from the city’s Health Department, based on data from public and private hospitals, show that the number of abortions performed in 2013 was 30,117.
Although officials say that the rise is due to greater information, statistics show that the number of second-trimester abortions (when foetal sex can be determined) jumped by 11 per cent compared to the first quarter, which grew 9 per cent.
Mgr Savio Fernandes, auxiliary bishop of Mumbai, told AsiaNews that “there may be many reasons behind this increase: bias against girls; the perception that the body belongs to us; promiscuity and affairs; poverty; an increasingly widespread culture of death; God relegated to the edges of existence.”
Nevertheless, faced with this situation, Mgr Fernandes provided some tips for things to change.
“Bring God at the centre of our lives!” he said. “All religious leaders should work for this, starting with their lifestyle, from their homilies to talking with members of other faiths, in order to create harmony.”
For the prelate, “Every school, and even the government, should hold mandatory courses on the value of education and the sanctity of human life.”
“Finally,” he explained, “the government and NGOs should find effective ways to promote development for the poor.”
According Pascoal Carvalho, a Mumbai doctor who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, “the high rate of abortions is often associated with sexual selection, due to a cultural preference for boys.”
This, he told AsiaNews, “is the dark side of India’s demographic change. In Maharashtra, which prides itself as a progressive state, the sex ratio fell steeply from 913 in 2001 to 883 in 2011. The dwindling sex ratio indicates that at least 5 to 7 per cent abortions are sex selective” with girls paying a deadly price.
In 1994, India’s federal government passed a Pre-Natal Diagnostic Technologies (PNDT) Act that outlaws the use of special tests and equipment to determine the sex of a foetus. However, the law has not curbed the rise in foeticide and female infanticide.
In 2011, the authorities ordered the seizure of all unregistered ultrasound machines and established a penalty (a fine or a prison term) for owners.
“Sadly,” the doctor told AsiaNews, foreign and domestic “Pharmaceutical companies are producing and aggressively marketing emergency contraception” and “the morning after pill,” marketing it to modern young women through television and magazine advertising”
Thus, “This culture of death, the murder of the defenceless unborn, is the ultimate confession of moral and social bankruptcy”.
(With permission from Nirmala Carvalho)
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