REPRODUCTION, ABORTION AND WOMEN'S HEALTH 85 The family planning programme can be more clearly looked at if we focus on the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (henceforth MTP Act), passed in 1971. The MTP act was directly related to the growing emphasis on family planning in the 1960's and the world wide fears of a population explosion in the third world. There are different trajectories to the question of population control for the west and for India. In the west, the issue of abortion is linked to the "right to self determination" and "the individual woman's right to choose". In the west, feminists supporting abortion (still not legalized in many western countries) articulate their position in terms of the rights of the woman. On the other hand, anti abortionists also speak in the language of rights, claiming that their focus is on the "rights and personhood of the foetus".7 In contrast, in India, the liberalisation of abortion was not linked to feminist activism. Health activist Amar Jessani and Aditi lyer suggest three possible reasons for this: "This might partly (though not wholly) be attributed to the absence of a strong feminist current within the (women's) movement during the 1960's and early 1970's... Secondly, anti abortion votaries in India are not as belligerent or as strident as their counterparts elsewhere... thirdly, the low priority may be engendered by the unawareness of the fact that legalisation has not been buttressed by safe and humane abortion services.8 Implicit in this statement is a recognition that the IWM is not always able to choose its agenda independently. It is often forced to respond to immediate and obvious crisis. Partly because the anti-abortionists have not been vocal in India, the IWM has not addressed the abortion issue frontally, even though studies show that the right to abortion remains a paper right, due to inadequate abortion services in the country. Jessani and lyer demonstrate that there is a ratio of 1:8 for legal to illegal abortions.9 The data collected by Jessani and lyer brings out at least two issues of significance. One, the inability of the IWM to prioritise abortion, owing perhaps to structural and organisational weaknesses. Its campaign based, somewhat sporadic character prevents monitoring of existing laws, the focus being on changes in law instead, this could partly explain the campaign around amniocentesis, which I will look at in greater detail later in this paper, secondly, as abortion services are poorly developed, the state policy of using MTP as a method of contraception has been a failure. It appears that conflicting layers of inefficiency, corruption and patriarchal interests create a