Author: Haleemah Patel
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International Sex Workers’ Rights Day 2022
3rd March is International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. This day’s history goes back to 2001, when over 25,000 sex workers of India gathered in Kolkata for a sex worker festival organised by Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, despite efforts from prohibitionist groups who tried to prevent it taking place by pressuring the government to revoke their…
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Reframing the contemporary child marriage debate – Lessons from India
Recent legislative developments on child marriage in India come at a time when the national data shows declining prevalence and a shift from child to early marriage. Evidence indicates that poverty and insecurity within patriarchal contexts are the main drivers of early marriage, a fact corroborated by the reported spike in child and early marriage…
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Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice
Abstract: Skimmed tells the story of the first recorded identical Black quadruplets, born in 1946 to Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood and Pete Fultz, a tenant farmer in North Carolina. Annie Mae’s white doctor named the sisters after his relatives then auctioned off the…
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Surrogacy Regulation is Stuck Between Market, Family and State
Through the years, India’s stand on surrogacy has varied from a medico-liberal to a carceral model, but the best safeguards for surrogates would be empowerment rather than relying on the market or the state for protection. Law has long been the site of intense political, social and economic contest over women’s reproductive labour. Surrogacy is…
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Tracing the journey, and flaws, of the surrogacy bill
The government has tried to regulate surrogacy for over a decade. Starting with the permissive 2005 guidelines of the Indian Council for Medical Research, the government has proposed increasingly restrictive bills in 2008, 2010, 2013 and 2014 and has, through notifications of the ministry of home affairs, sought to exclude prospective parents on the basis…
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What the new laws regulating fertility services in India say | In Focus podcast
Dr Prabha Kotiswaran speaks to us on whether the new laws protect the interests of couples who want a baby and of the women who would be egg donors or surrogates This month, two bills dealing with fertility services have been passed by Parliament — the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill 2021, and the Surrogacy…
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The humpty-dumpty-esque tale of two laws
The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha recently passed the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill, 2021 (ART) and the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2021 (SRB). Both laws were once a consolidated law which sat on a wall like ‘Humpty Dumpty’ for years. But in 2016, the nationalist rage against foreigners exploiting Indian women’s wombs led Humpty Dumpty…
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New surrogacy law ignores the labour involved in pregnancy
Surrogacy has been in the news recently, most because of actor Priyanka Chopra. But this wasalso the week that the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act (SRA), 2021 came into force. In an interview to Sunday Times. Prabha Kotiswaran, a professor of law and justice at King’s College, London who has extensively researched surrogacy laws in India, discusses…
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Unfair and Unjust-The Economic Rights and Entitlements of Separated/ Divorced Women in India
ABSTRACT: The patriarchal Indian state has ensured that the economic rights and entitlements of separated women remain at a minimum. My study of these women surveys the conditions under which they live and to what extent they are able to access and benefit from the law which anyway gives them limited rights in their homes.…
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Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill needs a thorough review
Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill raises constitutional, medico-legal, regulatory concerns. It needs a thorough review. Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan introduced the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill, 2020 (Bill) in the Lok Sabha on September 14. Its aim is to regulate ART banks and clinics, allow safe and ethical practice of ARTs and protect women and…