Right To Say No

REPRODUCTIVE health is being taken as a matter of immediate priority, especially for the developing nations and rightly so. It is an issue that not only involves maternal and child health, the threat of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, but also the reproductive rights of women. What must be remembered is that reproductive rights are essentially a part of women’s human rights, not different from other human rights like Right to life, Right to liberty and security, Right to privacy and the Right to equality. The right to say no to forced motherhood is also part and parcel of women’s human rights. Advocates of the Right to safe abortion say that no woman’s life should be put at risk by reason of pregnancy, nor her other rights violated if she has become pregnant against her wish. In Nepal too, voices are being raised over the pregnancies that result due to rape or incest—that women should not be barred from terminating such pregnancies. Almost fifty per cent of the maternal mortality cases are attributed to unsafe abortion in Nepal where abortion is illegal. The ultimate victims are women alone. There are hundreds of cases of women languishing in prison who are victims of rape, incest and at times widows. Instead of giving them justice, we have put them behind bars as they are found guilty of prima facie evidence of abortion. No one seems to be bothered what and who made them undergo abortion at the first place, what were the compelling circumstances? And the social organisations that speak for women’s rights have been active demanding safe abortion. The Eleventh Amendment of the National Code in the Parliament under consideration liberalises the Draconian law a little, making abortion conditional.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation is one such international non-government organisation, which started fifty years ago in Bombay and now is an umbrella organisation that has six regional offices the world over. Now IPPF has decided to transfer its South Asia Regional office to Nepal from London. With the IPPF office here in Nepal, added boost to advocacy of safe abortion can be expected.

Village Development

DESPITE the various programmes launched to develop the country’s rural areas, the development scenario in the villages still leaves much room for improvement. The development programmes launched in the past focusing on the needs of the rural folks have to be fine tuned so that the expectations of the common masses for, among others, health, education and transport, could be materialised. Even the INGOs and NGOs working in the rural sector, except for raising their awareness among the rural folks, have yet to make the people feel their presence in terms of development. As a result, Nepalese villages still house the poorest of the poor communities, most of them peopled by illiterate folks. And these are the same villages that are often hit by the scourge of diseases and other natural calamities, which in turn, further worsen their precarious situation. As such, in most rural areas of the nation, modern medical, educational, health and transportation facilities are still out of reach of the village people. How can the people who always have to struggle hard even to keep their body and soul together, think of other facilities? This is truly a big question standing before our policy makers, planners and, undoubtedly the bureaucrats. Indeed, poor implementation mechanism is responsible behind the dire straits of these village development programmes. Moreover, going by the state of development in the rural areas, it so seems that the policy makers have yet to put their implementation act together. But what is more surprising to note is that they continue to introduce various programmes having the same purpose. And the results are more often the same as well. In other words, there is much duplication. In the rural areas, facilities of transportation, education and health are indeed the basic components of rural development. As such, the government has always been effortful in ensuring that the above mentioned facilities are in place in the rural areas. While transportation facility can bring about drastic changes, for the better, in the villages, vocational education, along with health facility, could play a crucial role in the economic development of the rural folks. In fact, unless the rural people are provided with these development components, the overall development of the rural areas where over 90 per cent of the population reside, is not possible.