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The debate over abortion in Tamil Nadu has acquired a new political and religious context after Tamil Nadu Assembly Speaker JCD Prabhakar participated in the fifth National March for Life in Chennai on August 8 and 9 and spoke against abortion. He said at the event that life begins at conception and said the issue would be brought to the attention of Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay.
India’s abortion law wasn’t always about a woman’s right to choose. Under the colonial-era IPC, abortion was largely a criminal offence, but the unsafe abortions and deaths that followed led the government-appointed Shantilal Shah Committee to recommend changes. Its recommendations eventually led to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act in 1971, allowing abortion in specified circumstances.
But nearly a century ago, the question of controlling pregnancy was being debated in the pages of Kudi Arasu and Pagutharivu, magazines associated with the Self-Respect Movement and founded by Dravidian icon Periyar.
Their writings did not offer one simple position on abortion. Read together, they distinguished between preventing conception and terminating a pregnancy, while repeatedly arguing for birth control because of the consequences of repeated pregnancies for women.
The discussion also went beyond population or family finances. It dealt with women's health, marriage, religion, poverty and the question of who should have control over childbearing.
In an April 6, 1930, article titled ‘Karppathadai’ (contraception), Kudi Arasu described birth control as essential for “women’s liberation and self-sovereignty”. The article, likely written by Periyar, noted that others supported birth control for reasons including women's physical health, the ability to support children and the economic condition of families and the country. But it said these were not its primary concern. Its emphasis was women's freedom and independence.
The article gave an example of a woman trapped in an unhappy situation because she had children to care for. According to the article, pregnancy was particularly an obstacle to women's independence and was also a major cause of women falling ill, ageing prematurely and having shorter lives. Kudi Arasu repeatedly challenged the assumptions about marriage, religion and women’s role within the family.
In the chapter on contraception in Pen Yen Adimaiyanal? (Why were women enslaved?) Periyar distinguished between the reasons commonly given for birth control — including women's physical health, the economic circumstances of the country, the expenses involved in raising children and the need to control population growth — and his own reason for advocating it: women's liberation and independence.
Sarah Hodges, in her seminal research work Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940, places contraception within the Self-Respect Movement's larger critique of orthodoxy.
In the chapter ‘An Apocalyptic Body Politics of Modernity: Contraception and the Self Respect Movement’ she argues that the movement approached contraception through a radically different social and ideological programme, rejecting the maternalism, nationalism and respectability that shaped much of the contemporary birth-control discourse and instead presenting contraception as part of a programme of personal emancipation.
Hodges notes that Periyar was central to this argument but not its only voice. Kudi Arasu carried regular writings on contraception through the 1930s, including contributions from Sami Chidambaranar and M Singaravelu, while women activists and writers such as S Neelavathi and Indrani Balasubramaniam also wrote about contraception.
Their arguments included the health dangers of repeated pregnancies and the way constant motherhood could prevent women from pursuing other possibilities in their lives.
By March 1932, Kudi Arasu was discussing the question in more specific terms. A series by Sami Chidambaranar examined why people wanted children and how births could be reduced. The argument against abstinence was that sexual desire was a natural human instinct and that expecting ordinary people to suppress it completely was impractical.
The article then considered abortion after conception. It rejected terminating a pregnancy as the preferred way of controlling births, describing it as harmful to women and saying that it could result in illness and physical weakness. Its preferred method was to prevent conception in the first place.
But another article in the same series made a different and more specific point about the law. It said that if a woman already had three children and did not wish to have more, undergoing an abortion should not be considered a legal offence and doctors should be allowed to assist her. It also said that practising birth control after three children was not harmful to the nation.
The same year, Kudi Arasu looked at the social pressures surrounding childbearing. In September 1932, an article by Manimaran of Tirumangalam described what it called the “child mania” of society. Marriage, it argued, was treated as though its purpose was to produce children. A woman who did not become pregnant could be called barren, while a husband could take another wife.
The article also attacked the belief that children were simply “God's gift”. It described women repeatedly becoming pregnant until their health was ruined and argued that birth control could prevent women from damaging their health through annual childbirth while also preventing families from having more children than they could afford to raise.
Three years later, Pagutharivu published perhaps the most vivid record of what these arguments meant in women's lives.
Its August 1, 1935, issue carried ‘Birth Control: Twelve Letters’, a collection of letters written to doctors by women seeking information about contraception. The introduction itself said the letters were being published to demonstrate the suffering caused by repeated childbirth and to argue that teaching methods of preventing pregnancy were necessary and should not be treated as a crime.
The letters describe women who wanted no more children but could not obtain information about how to prevent another pregnancy.
One woman wrote that she had two children within two years of marriage and became pregnant again before she could obtain advice from her doctor. She was six months pregnant with her fourth child even though her eldest was not yet three. She feared that if the situation continued she would lose her mind.
Another described a disabled sister-in-law who had three children in three-and-a-half years. Every delivery required surgical intervention, and the third nearly cost her her life. The doctor apparently expected that she would not want more children, but she had no knowledge of how to prevent another pregnancy.
A 32-year-old woman described becoming bedridden after childbirth, with swollen veins, pain and weakness. Her doctor warned that another pregnancy within three years could endanger her life. When she asked what she should do, he advised her to be careful or abstain from intercourse completely. She questioned whether that was a practical solution.
Another, only 20, described three miscarriages and premature deliveries in two years of marriage. During the latest premature delivery she had bled so heavily that people thought she had died. Her doctor refused to explain birth-control methods and told her to “let children be born first”.
The other letters describe similar circumstances: women who had undergone five pregnancies but had only two surviving children; women who had given birth eight times in ten years; and a 28-year-old with seven children who was already extremely weak and had been told by a doctor not to become pregnant again.
The ages in some of the letters are striking. One 17-year-old said she had been married at 13 and already had six children. Another woman, married at 12, said that at 30 she had eleven children, ten of them alive. She said her health had been ruined and that the family already had more children than it could afford to feed and protect.
The final letter came from a 39-year-old woman who had been married at 14 and had sixteen children, fourteen of them alive. She was three months pregnant again and had been bedridden for two months. Her doctor had warned that another pregnancy could threaten her life.
These were therefore not abstract arguments about population. They were letters from women seeking a way to stop another pregnancy.
The ninth letter takes the discussion directly to abortion. Written by a husband, it describes his wife undergoing a major surgical procedure in which her abdomen was opened, her uterus incised and the foetus removed. Doctors told her that she must never become pregnant again.
Yet, the writer said, doctors had not explained contraception because they feared the laws of the country. He wanted to know where she could learn about birth control and argued that if the law prevented doctors from providing such information, doctors' organisations should challenge those restrictions.
The letter does not itself make a general argument for abortion. Its immediate concern is the absence of information about preventing another pregnancy after the woman had undergone a dangerous procedure.
The distinction between contraception and abortion appears again in Kudi Arasu in November 1945. An article by NF Wadia defined birth control as preventing conception and said there was a “vast difference” between birth control and destroying a foetus.
The article again linked frequent childbirth to damage to women's health and sometimes death. It also made a class argument: educated people had access to birth-control information, while poor people, lacking such knowledge, could resort to destructive methods of abortion.
The discussion also needs to be read against a period when women who lacked access to contraception could resort to methods of terminating pregnancies outside medical care.
This is not a complete survey of everything Kudi Arasu and Pagutharivu published on the topic. But even this material shows the range of questions they raised about contraception, abortion and women's control over childbearing.
The language belongs to the 1930s and 1940s. The question running through these pages is straightforward: who should decide when a woman does not want another pregnancy?
Nearly a century ago, Kudi Arasu and Pagutharivu were already putting that question into print.
