Abortion – Dharma, Law or Justice

Change - a fact of human life. We may not be aware of it in our day to day experience but it continues to affect us in one way or the other. A hundred and thousand years might be a moment in the life of rocks and mountains but in human society, changes take place in the course of merely a generation or two. Dharma, law and justice; are constitutive of change and the self-identity in India. A situation which may be coined as a ‘pluralism of ideologies’. The focus is on the concept of law and justice with Dharma in Indian thought.

- Justice, like just about everything else in ancient India, has been a much debated topic since time immemorial. Justice is positive and its realization depends on law; however justice is not the same as law; and they have a means to end relationship.

- Dharma is the foundation of legal ordering in India. Often best be translated as 'justice,' though dharma also means law, rightness (as opposed to wrongness), religious ethics, and simply the way things ought to be or even the way things truly are. Dharma is different from mere traditional law which was a coexistence of justice largely isolated from each other.

- Legal ideologies which have brought a new sense of selfhood to all communities in India, determine the meaning-content and goals of life in society; a basic factor in justice.

Abortion is a thorny issue in the economically advanced western countries even today. In spite of scientific outlook and 'modernity' there is no consensus solution. Though I myself, in my own period and culture, violently oppose abortion. If I were a law-giver nowadays, and were to enter our contemporary debates about abortion, one can imagine the sort of stance I would take.

- Can every woman choose whether or not to have an abortion? This would be relativistic, at least to the degree that it acknowledged different ideals for different individuals.
- No woman can have an abortion? This would be univocal.
- Or both – ‘Every woman can choose whether or not to have an abortion’ and ‘No woman can have an abortion’. This would be contradictory.

A woman who already has three children and is over thirty can have an abortion, and a woman who has no children and is under thirty cannot have an abortion' (influenced by the infinite varieties of the human conditions). But what about, a woman over thirty with no children; or that of a woman under thirty with three children?
Despite the relativity of Dharma, its context is sensitively, however, paradoxically guards Indians from the dangers of true relativism. In any given circumstance, there is only one thing to do – Change.