LAST MONTH, the Karnataka High Court permitted full abdominal hysterectomy of a 23-year-old woman with severe intellectual disabilities. The judgment in response to a prayer made by her parents, has reignited a fraught and deeply uncomfortable debate about reproductive rights of women living with disabilities in India. The case, which appears otherwise straightforward, involved a multidisciplinary medical board that confirmed the woman’s incapacity to provide informed consent, documented her inability to manage menstrual hygiene, and unanimously recommended the procedure in her ‘best interests.’ The Court, exercising its parens patriae jurisdiction, granted permission.
Yet beneath this seemingly benign judicial intervention lies a troubling historical continuum. The Court’s order, while careful and circumspect in its language, sits uneasily within a broader context where women with disabilities have been systematically subjected to medical procedures that permanently curtail their reproductive capacity, often without their knowledge or consent. The judgment demands scrutiny not for its individual merits, but for what it reveals about the persistent gaps in India’s legal and policy framework regarding reproductive autonomy for persons with disabilities.
The Karnataka case is the latest instance of courts being compelled to adjudicate matters that should ideally be governed by clear legislative guidance and robust medical protocols. The fundamental question of how one obtains informed consent from a person who cannot, by definition, provide it, remains unresolved in Indian law, leaving families, medical professionals, and ultimately the judiciary to navigate an ethical minefield.
How the law evolved
Historically, women with intellectual disabilities have been highly vulnerable to forced sterilisation and non-consensual medical procedures. The most infamous instance remains of the Shirur home in Pune in 1994, where eleven women with psychosocial disabilities were subjected to hysterectomies. Ten others escaped the procedure only after women’s organisations raised an outcry, and a delegation led by former CPI(M) MP and All India Democratic Women’s Association (‘AIDWA’) leader late Ahilya Rangnekar met the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Sharad Pawar to halt the exercise. The incident exposed the chilling ease with which institutions could disregard the bodily integrity of disabled women in the name of convenience or misguided protection.
