This has been a very important day in the Ministry for prevention of maternal mortality in this country. Not just from the narrow sense of maternal mortality but also from the ultimate issue of women empowerment. I think India is one of the countries in the developing world that has granted the right to have a child to the woman and also the right to abort if the child is unwanted in the case of a married woman.

The MTP Act that we have is one of the most liberal legislations in the area of abortion that even some of the developed countries do not have. But having given the right, we must also
see that this facility that is created under the law is given to our women, and as mentioned by the earlier speakers, even today, apart from high rate of maternal mortality, we have more than a lakh of women dying because of unsafe abortions. This we cannot afford to continue.

The abortion facilities in this country are available under the legislation but actually in the field, the system is so cumbersome to recognize the clinic as an abortion clinic that the government has been prompted to make an amendment recently in the legislation decentralizing the power to recognize clinics.

This has ben a very important step and the Parliament has passed this legislation in the last winter session and we hope that with the decentralized procedure, there will be more number of competent doctors who will be recognized for performing abortions not only in the cities and towns but also in the countryside. Side by side, we are also looking at the area of medical abortion. This has come to the country very recently but as pointed out by Dr SP Agarwal, there is always a chance of it being misused because if this drug is freely available in the market, it will lead to a number of avoidable deaths.

It is necessary for us to come out with clear-cut guidelines and not only to issue guidelines but also to train our doctors, to sensitise them on the issue of following the right protocol for medical abortion and also recognize the clinics where medical abortion can be done and not in any consulting room. It needs back-up facilities and infrastructure and those things need to be guaranteed before an abortion clinic is recognized for medical abortion. I congratulate Dr Suneeta Mittal for taking this initiative to organize this consortium.

A couple of months back, we had a small workshop on RU486 and now its guidelines would be prepared. This is the nextstep on a larger scale at national level involving national and international experts in this field. We definitely look forward to having clear-cut guidelines on medical abortion in our country. We also would like to promote widespread dissemination across the country in different States, where we have a problem as regards high maternal mortality. I once again thank Dr Suneeta Mittal, All India Institute of Medical Sciences and all the organizers for making this possible.