The Other Population Statutes

In one line

Three Indian statutes affect fertility without being about population at all, and the third of them exists because a technology promoted for family planning was used to eliminate daughters.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: three statutes bear on population without being population-control laws. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 raises the effective age at marriage, which is one of the strongest determinants of fertility. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act 1971 governs the lawful termination of a pregnancy. And the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act 1994 prohibits the use of diagnostic techniques for sex selection, and was enacted because prenatal diagnosis had been used to eliminate female foetuses.

The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006

What it does. It defines a child as a male who has not completed twenty-one years and a female who has not completed eighteen, makes a child marriage voidable at the option of the contracting party who was a child, provides for maintenance and for the custody and legitimacy of children of such marriages, punishes an adult male who contracts a child marriage and those who perform, conduct, direct, abet or promote one, and provides for a Child Marriage Prohibition Officer and for an injunction to prohibit a child marriage.

Why it belongs here. Age at marriage is one of the four levers of the demographic transition. A woman who marries at twenty rather than at sixteen has a shorter reproductive span, is more likely to have completed her education, and has substantially lower completed fertility. The National Population Policy 2000's sixth socio-demographic goal is to promote delayed marriage for girls, not earlier than eighteen and preferably after twenty, so the statute and the policy are pursuing the same object by different means.

And the honest assessment. A voidable marriage is a weak sanction, because it requires the child to move a court, and the incidence of child marriage has fallen with education and income rather than with prosecution. That is the general lesson of this module applied to one statute.

The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act 1971

What it does. It permits a registered medical practitioner to terminate a pregnancy in the circumstances the Act specifies. Section 3 provides the grounds, including risk to the life of the pregnant woman or grave injury to her physical or mental health, and substantial risk that the child would suffer serious physical or mental abnormality; it provides for the number of practitioners whose opinion is required at different stages of gestation; and its explanations deem the anguish caused by a pregnancy resulting from rape, and by the failure of a contraceptive device or method, to constitute a grave injury to mental health.