ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses abortion in the Indian subcontinent, specifically India and Bangladesh, as the ways in which conversations around abortion have played out in the two countries are significant and different, regardless of geographical proximity. With a discussion of family planning programmes in the two nations, it moves on to the debates around abortion and its practice in the two nations. More specifically, I focus on the law in India and its shortcomings, while addressing the issues of sex- and disability-selective abortions and the ways in which the operation of reproductive justice in these scenarios is particularly complex, and reproductive choice is quite inapplicable and requires nuance. For Bangladesh, the active circumvention of restrictive abortion legislation, through the instrumentalised language of menstrual regulation, is central to the discussion, followed by how abortion was used as a method of preserving nationhood in the period of its consolidation as a nascent state.
