RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Women’s Right To Abortion Debate Reopens

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Oct 14 1998 (IPS) - The debate on abortion has reopened in Sri Lanka after three years, with a government minister saying proposals to revise an archaic law banning pregnancy termination are under consideration.

“The government is studying proposals to legalise abortions. We are looking at the issue but have not taken a final decision,” Health Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva said in a newspaper interview last week.

Under Sri Lankan laws, abortion is legal only when doctors think it essential for saving the life of the mother. Yet the medically assisted procedure is being routinely performed by some 20 clinics, albeit illegally, and the police are not cracking down on these widely-known places. – “How will it help society?” countered Deputy-Inspector General of Police H.M. Kotakadeniya when asked whether the police would shut down abortion clinics.

In his opinion, if the police were to “raid and wipe out abortion clinics in keeping with the law, what would we do with all the unwanted pregnancies. What provisions are there in the law to deal with a social problem of this nature?”

None it seems, according to Daya Abeywickrema, executive director of Sri Lanka’s Family Planning Association (FPA) who would like the government to legalise abortion. “It is futile to prevent abortions by law because they take place on a daily basis,” he believes. The number of abortions varies from 500 to 700 daily across the island.

Abeywickrema said that the majority of those who wanted abortions are married women. “They want to have abortions when the family planning method used by them fails,” he explains.

Everyday, the FPA’s office in Colombo receives calls asking one question: How do we get an abortion? Abeywickrema says that the association’s biggest fear is that most abortion clinics, since they operate illegally, do not have proper medical facilities.

Unsafe abortions are among major reasons for high maternal mortality figures. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), over 20 million women in the world are put to risk by unsafe abortions every year with approximately 70,000 dying as a result.

Most Sri Lankan women cannot afford the high charges of abortion clinics. The majority go to the innumerable quacks that offer to terminate pregnancy at very little cost or resort to outrightly dangerous methods like inserting sharp objects into the vagina to destroy the foetus.

Abortion is taboo, according to three of the island’s main religions – Buddhism, Christianity and Islam – on the grounds that it snuffs out a life. But some moderate priests have openly supported abortion as inevitable and said it should be allowed as illegal abortions were unsafe.

The Sri Lankan law relating to abortion – Section 303 of the Penal Code – was enacted in 1883, during colonial rule under the British. Most sections of the Code have been amended over the years, but laws relating to abortion remain unchanged.

In July 1995, Sri Lanka’s Chandrika Kumaratunga government tried to update the archaic law within a year of its coming to power. Justice Minister Prof. Gamini Peiris said he was introducing amendments to the Penal Code to liberalise the abortion law and legalise abortion when a child is conceived as a result of rape or incest.

The proposal triggered an avalanche of criticism in the media and other fora, with parliamentarians and religious leaders saying abortion should not be permitted on religious grounds.

The government had to back-track. When the proposals were presented to Parliament, two months later, the minister had bowed to outside pressure and the section on abortion was omitted.

Health Minister Silva’s statements are the Kumaratunga government’s second attempt to push through changes in the abortion rules. And again, pro- and anti-abortionists have started slugging it out in newspaper columns.

As yet the minister insists that while various people may have different opinions on the issue, the “possibility of the government changing its position on abortions is very slim, perhaps almost nil.”

Leading child rights campaigner, Maureen Seneviratne, is among vocal anti-abortionists in the Sri Lankan capital. “I may be labelled backward but if these arguments about a woman’s right, hold and it is legalised, it will be the first step towards

madness,” she grimly says.

“Don’t forget that the unborn child did not ask for all this. He or she has a right to live,” she argues. However, Seneviratne is willing to make one concession. Women who are raped, sexually assaulted or victims of incest should be given the right to terminate pregnancy through abortion, she says.

Complications from unsafe abortions, bleeding during and after childbirth, obstructed labour and other reasons kills 600,000 women in the world, and most of them are from South Asia, UNFPA says. Pro-abortionists believe safe abortion could help lower maternal mortality figures.