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Showing posts from August, 2023

Abortion and the Religion Lens

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Abortion equivalent to murder logic has been prominent in our society and even propagated through movies. “We don’t want to be murderers, right?” says Deepti Batra (Kareena Kapoor) to her husband Varun Batra (Akshay Kumar) in their famous 2019 film Good Newwz. And if you all might have remembered or guessed, they were talking about abortion. Now the question arises: What exactly is abortion and the Right to Abortion, and why is there so much fuss around it? WHO defines abortion as “pregnancy termination prior to 20 weeks' gestation or a fetus born weighing less than 500 g” . Right to Abortion simply means that a woman has the right to abort, and it depends on her will and decision. In India, Abortion has been legal under various circumstances since the introduction of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act 1971. So, now the question arises as to why most people are still against abortion. And we will try to look at this issue from the lens of ‘Religion.’ Karl Ma

Surrogacy, Kinship and the Social Dynamics of Reproductive Behaviour

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Reproductive behaviour is rooted in social relationships as well as political and cultural circumstances. Creating settings that facilitate behavioural change necessitates a careful examination of these situations. However, the prevalent conceptual framework for analysing reproductive behaviour is strongly individualistic, drawn from Becker and Easterlin's fertility cost-benefit models, with the individual or ‘reproductive' couple as the unit of decision-making. Ethnographies have shown that such a paradigm is inadequate in its knowledge of human behaviour as well as its assumptions about the core units of reproductive decision-making. Reproductive behaviour is impacted by social relationships and institutions at the local level, such as familial groupings, informal social networks, local political organisations, and religious and spiritual counsellors, which are influenced by and are the product of larger social, political, economic, and historical processes. Many reproductive