PS;Sorry if comment is duplicated.CAPTCHA issues.

Logesh - thanks.

And so you know the blog Saffron Tree? Lots of good recos there.

The best children’s books I’ve picked up have been from the pavement second hand book stores. They frequently have some extraordinary books - ‘One Odd Old Owl’, “Do Pirates Take Baths?’, ‘Lupinchen’, ‘The Big Pets’.

And of the Indian stories, the Tulika and Pratham books are lovely. Esp. Tulika’s bilingual books.

[sorry about the long comment. hobby horse.]

n!

Furthermore, the reasons she gives for declaring abortion tantamount to murder have no factual basis. Heart beating? You can hear the heart beat way before the 20th week. The fetus has a personality in the seventh month? Has this been measured? I would like to know when exactly that personality develops. Psychology shows that babies have no self-identity till around 18 months of age. And even the kicking/quickening starts well before the 20th week - its just that the mother feels it around the 20th week because of the abdominal walls thickness. She is going by an arbitary definition of viability and calling it ‘life’.

And as for all those anecdotes about not abortng Beethoven or Stephen Hawking or an IIT genius, I think people who argue this way don’t really talk about probabilities only about these vivid cases to confirm their basic intuition.

I’m not sure what precisely you liked about this essay. It seems to me to be full of melodramatic statements, a lot of really inane rhetoric but not much substance. What exactly did you like about it?

And what does Padmanabhan want precisely? Does she want government enforced guidelines that forbid any prospective parents from aborting children with, say, Downs Syndrome? Well, that’s fair enough but then what to make of this: “But do we really need a court’s definition to know that a beating heart is an absolute sign of life?” What rubbish.

Regulating abortion is a tricky business. On one hand, there’s the woman’s right to choose, and on the other, there’s the problem (in India at least) of selective abortions of female fetuses. Now does Padmanabhan want to add to this the abortion of a fetus with a congenital disease and complicate already existing abortion laws?

It’s not that I object to her stance, which is fair. What I object to is the Olympian tone of outrage as if parents all over the world need Manjula Padmanabhan to tell them what is wrong and what isn’t. Let’s leave it to them to decide, no? How is this piece supposed to help policy-makers who are grappling with the framing of abortion laws?

Last, but not the least, I’m not sure whether Padmanabhan would want abortions at all but the piece could well be read as advocating banning ALL abortions, no? Her argument about beating hearts could well be stretched endlessly.