On reproductive justice: ‘domestic violence’, rights and the law in India

Abstract

In this paper we draw attention to the difficulty of accessing reproductive rights in the absence of effective state and legal guarantees for gender equity and citizenship, and argue that if reproductive rights are to be meaningful interventions on the ground, they must be reframed in terms of reproductive justice. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Rajasthan, Northwest India, we track two dynamic legal aid interventions on reproductive health rights in India, concerned with domestic violence and maternal mortality respectively, that have sought to fill this existing gap between ineffective state policies and the rhetoric on reproductive rights. Through an analysis of these interventions, we propose that requirements of reproductive justice cannot be met through discrete or private, albeit creative legal initiatives, pursued by individuals or civil society organisations but must involve comprehensive policies as well as strategies and alliances between state, non-state, transnational organisations and progressive political groups.

En este artículo destacamos la dificultad de acceder a los derechos reproductivos sin garantías estatales y legales eficaces para la igualdad entre los sexos y la ciudadanía, y argumentamos que para que los derechos reproductivos sean intervenciones fiables sobre el terreno, estos deben ser reconstruidos en términos de justicia reproductiva. Basándonos en un trabajo de campo etnográfico en varios lugares de Rayastán, al noroeste de la India, hacemos un seguimiento de dos programas dinámicos de asistencia jurídica sobre los derechos de la salud reproductiva en la India, que están relacionados con la violencia doméstica y la mortalidad maternal, y cuyo objetivo era cubrir este vacío existente entre las políticas ineficaces del Estado y la retórica sobre los derechos reproductivos. Tras analizar estos programas, proponemos que no se puede responder a los requisitos de la justicia en materia reproductiva mediante iniciativas legales separadas o privadas, aunque sean creativas, llevadas a cabo por personas u organizaciones de la sociedad civil, sino que deben introducirse políticas generales así como estrategias y alianzas entre organizaciones estatales, no estatales y transnacionales y grupos políticos progresivos.

Avec cet article, nous voulons attirer l'attention sur la difficulté à accéder aux droits reproductifs en l'absence de garanties étatiques et juridiques efficaces, favorables à l'égalité et à la citoyenneté des genres, et nous soutenons que si les droits reproductifs doivent se traduire par des interventions significatives sur le terrain, ils doivent être revus sous l'angle de la justice reproductive. En exploitant un travail ethnographique de terrain conduit sur plusieurs sites au Rajasthan, dans le Nord-Ouest de l'Inde, nous évaluons deux interventions dynamiques d'aide juridique pour les droits à la santé reproductive en Inde - traitant spécifiquement de la violence domestique et de la mortalité maternelle - qui cherchent à combler le fossé existant entre les politiques publiques inefficaces et le discours sur les droits reproductifs. À partir de l'analyse de ces interventions, nous postulons que les besoins en matière de justice reproductive ne peuvent être comblés par des initiatives discrètes ou privées, y compris créatives, menées par des individus ou par des organisations de la société civile, mais qu'ils doivent impliquer aussi bien des politiques globales que des stratégies et des alliances entre des organisations étatiques, non-étatiques et transnationales, et des groupes politiques progressistes.

Keywords::

• reproductive justice
• reproductive rights
• gender equity
• India

Notes

^1. The fieldwork on which this paper is based was conducted by the second and third authors with Pradeep Kachhawa between July 2009 and June 2010 as part of a wider study on reproductive rights funded by an ESRC grant (Unnithan Res-062-23-1609). The legal focus on reproductive rights detailed here is based on structured and semi-structured interviews, focus-group discussions, attendance of workshops and other events, and participant observation with a diverse group of actors working in this area in Jaipur and Delhi, including advocates, judges, women's organisations and activists, family counsellors and representatives from the Rajasthan and National Human Rights Commissions.

^2.Laxmi Mandal vs the Deen Dayal Harinagar Hospital (W.P.C.C 8853/2008) and Jaitun v Maternity Home, MCD, Jangpura & Ors, W.P. No. 10700/2009. (W.P.[C] Nos. 8853 of 2008 & 10700 of 2009 page 13 of 51).

^3. To preserve the anonymity of informants, all names of individuals and organisations (apart from the Human Rights Law Network and People's Union for Civil Liberties) have been changed.

^4. Henceforth, we shall use the acronym PWDVA to refer to this act.

^5. The summaries and the complete legal judgments in both the cases can be found at http://www.hrln.org

^6. The HRLN is a national human rights group of legal advocates which uses the law to bring about social justice for poor and marginalised groups. Headquartered in Delhi, the organisation has smaller branches throughout India which enact legal interventions at the both the state and national level.

^7. Here the Court was in line with a series of recent Supreme Court judgments to invoke international covenants, the most famous among them being Vishakha vs State of Rajasthan (1997), where CEDAW was used to lay down guidelines on sexual harassment at the workplace.

^8. The Directive Principle of State Policy, as specified in Article 47 of Part 1V of the Constitution, are relatively less prominent than the rights set contained in Part III; they are non-justiciable rights and cannot be enforced through legal recourse.

^9. The PWDVA clause on sexual abuse states that:

… any act, omission or commission, or conduct of the respondent shall constitute as domestic violence in case it: harms or injures or endangers the health, safety, life, limb or well being, whether mental or physical, of the aggrieved person or tends to do so and includes causing physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal and emotional abuse and economic abuse … (The Protection of Women From Domestic Violence Act, 2005, NO. 43 Of 2005 [clause 3a])

^10. Interviewed by the authors in July 2010, Jaipur.

^11. Personal Communication to the authors, 2012.

^12.http://reproductivejustice.org/assets/docs/ACRJ-A-New-Vision.pdf Accessed 16 December 2011. For a reframing of the global reproductive rights agenda see also Corrêa and Petchesky (1994).

^13. Reproductive rights by women are recognised in specific ways, such as in the right to become pregnant, but not in terms of the right to determine sexual access to one's body or the right not to have children. In relation to sex selection, Unnithan-Kumar (2010) suggests that women may perceive reproductive rights to include the right to terminate the foetus they carry.

^14. While it will be fair to claim that the language of rights (haq) and justice or ‘nyay’ is inflected a great deal by existing constitutional language, this is not to say that alternative justificatory premises for both rights and justice do not exist (see Madhok 2009, 2013).

^15. Different strains within the movement have championed a diverse range of issues related to the environment, sexuality, representation, health and civil rights; in fact, the movement is often said to have experienced three discernable ‘waves’ (Gandhi and Shah 1992): its anti colonial/nationalist phase, its autonomous/large classed mobilisation phase and the ‘third wave’, from 1980s onwards, which is witnessing the women's movement in India (Menon 1999), with debates on sexualities, intersectional oppressions and identities, and a renewed emphasis on institutional and legal reform and citizenship becoming increasingly important.

^16. These gender orthodoxies were also partially reflected in the feminist movement itself, which till recently has been unreflexively heteronormative (Madhok 2010). The assumption of heternonormativity retained a strong grip over the passage of the PWDVA 2005 too.

^17. Here we are referring to ‘private’ in both senses of the word: as a quality belonging to persons and one that exists as a description of spatiality.

^18. It is important to note that the PWDVA only comments on ‘sexual abuse’ in a general way and does not explicitly include ‘marital rape’, which continues to be legal in India.

^19. See Menon (2004).

^20. According to a recent report, only 14 states have separate budgetary allocations for the Act (see http://www.dsw.gnu.ac.in/UserFiles/File/UTTHAN_MARCH_2012.pdf p. 29).

^21. Indeed, these are critiques brought out by members of the Lawyer's Collective themselves (Jaising 2009).

^22. For feminist discomfort on rights see, in particular, Brown (1995), Grewal (2005), Kiss (1997), Menon (2004) and Spivak (1999).