Legal Mandates and Ethical Dilemmas of Feticide in Late-term Termination of Pregnancy in India

The Termination of pregnancy in the late second and third trimester poses deep medical, legal, and ethical issues. In India, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Amendment Act 2021 extends abortion access to 24 weeks for specific cases such as rape survivors and fetal abnormality and allows medical boards to approve termination beyond that point if the mother’s life is at risk or for severe fetal anomalies. However, there are chances of inadvertent neonatal survival. To avoid this, making a feticide procedure, usually intracardiac potassium chloride injection, antecedent to induction of labor and prior to the termination procedure has been advised by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) (2017, 2018) as well as medical boards of top institutions such as AIIMS. Although these steps are taken in an attempt to prevent legal as well as administrative issues, they put the physicians into ethical dilemma, undermining the Hippocratic oath of saving life. This article discusses India’s complex legal and ethical issues regarding late-term abortion. It highlights an ethical problem: whether to perform feticide or not, as it conflicts with the core medical principle of preserving life.