Doctor G: How the film sensitively touches upon consent, patriarchy and female agency

In an era where we fetishize opinions we don’t own, the weekly ‘Moderate Mahila Mandate’ presents unadulterated and non-partisan views on what’s happening to women in India today.

There she is. Lying discarded on a bed in a dubious clinic. An underage girl close to dying during a spurious abortion. Her crime: an affair with a shady married man. It left almost everyone in the audience teary-eyed.

Doctor G may be an uproarious medical comedy (with some truly LOL moments) about Dr. Uday Gupta­­––the disinclined male student in an all-female gynaecology department at a government hospital in Bhopal­––but it sensitively touches upon issues like consent, patriarchy, female agency, lascivious parents, extra-marital affairs, and male-female friendship. The film’s centrepiece is what is most gender-bending: whether it’s better to lose or use the male touch to be a man in a woman’s world.

Which is, in part, not unlike the real world as we know it today. For we saw a man––Justice D Y Chandrachud––surprise India with a progressive judgment about something that has so far been treated as a ‘female’ issue: abortion. It was a milestone for Indian women, who have little sexual autonomy, but face large sex and gender-based violence, especially by their own families. It also came at a time when the (sane) world was expressing disgust about the Supreme Court overturning the right to abort in the United States. We were progressing while the world was regressing.

Forget the age-old morality of it all: Does a woman have the right to an abortion? Is the foetus a human being with a fundamental right to life? We should be asking new questions: Why do women have to pay the price for something that should equally penalise the partner? In every conversation about abortion the woman’s right is highlighted, rightly so, but why do we never talk about taking away the man’s right? No pregnancy, no opinion. Make the exploitation punishable, not the industry. Because for some reason everyone has an opinion on everything a woman does with her body. Especially men. And they do this without placing themselves in a woman’s shoes. They don’t understand that a great deal changes for women if abortion is available to them. Denying abortion is denying a woman’s freedom, her reproductive rights and her equality.

Unlike their male contemporaries, never in history have women had control over their own stories. Women in India have had it particularly rough. Sure, abortion was made legal in 1971 under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, but people started misusing the law to abort millions of female foetuses. So much so that our gender ratio became terribly awry, earning us the moniker of ‘a country of missing women.’ Thus, the authorities––despite it clearly violating a woman’s constitutional rights––made strict rules about who could terminate a pregnancy and until what stage. Even if you were a 10-year-old rape survivor you couldn’t get an abortion after 20 weeks unless the courts approved. A traditional preference for sons screwed our daughters in more ways than one.

The law was also not inclusive, but limited to married women, divorcees, widows, minors, “disabled and mentally ill women” and survivors of sexual assault or rape. In a country that’s home to 73 million single women, the law was not only arbitrary but also discriminatory. Why does a woman’s lack of marital status deny her the choice to abort an unwanted pregnancy?

The irony was that thanks to a culture which has no comprehensive sex education and limited access to modern contraception as well as contraceptive methods for women (thanks to all sorts of taboos and lack of information) abortion rates were higher. This further compounded the issue for women because when access to safe and legal abortion is limited, deaths and injuries become common. Almost 67% of total abortions became unsafe claiming the lives of close to eight women every day. Women become disproportionately affected by something that is entirely preventable. The law provided women a greater disservice than service.

The world simply forgot that criminalizing abortion does not stop abortions. It just makes abortion less safe. It kills women.

Because that’s what it takes right? Savita Halappanavar became the face of Ireland’s pro-abortion movement when she died in an Irish hospital after being denied an abortion. But why does it always take the death of women––starting with Jyoti Singh, and as we’re seeing with Mahsa Amini––for society to wake up from its stupor?

It was only in 2021, after much outrage, that MTP allowed (some categories of) women to seek abortions between 20 and 24 weeks. That’s why Justice Chandrachud was that much-needed male touch in a female world. When he ruled that unmarried women can undergo an abortion up to 24 weeks, on par with married women, it was hailed by almost all women. It recognized women’s right to their own bodies. It showed that women are no longer bound by husbands and in-laws to possess a right to their own selves. It showed that society would support, at least by way of the law of land, the lived experiences of scores of women. It showed that there should be no discrimination between married, single, separated, widowed, or divorced women. Society learnt that the badge of honour is being a woman, not being a “married” woman.

Raising the hackles of wayward men and MRAs, the top court also added that forceful pregnancy of a married woman can be treated as marital rape for the purposes of abortion. Although India does not yet consider marital rape an offence, recognizing these rights in constitutional and affirmative terms is a shot in the arm for women everywhere.

Because guess what, there’s nothing like the ‘perfect victim’, which is a concept that has been denied to women. Doctor G also addresses this. The underage girl in the film is an imperfect victim, sleeping with a married man, but instead of making her a cautionary tale, as Indian films are inclined to do, we see the brilliant ensemble of actors­­––Ayushmann Khurrana, Rakul Preet Singh, Shefali Shah and Sheeba Chaddha––rally together to save her. As should the world.

Instead of banning or dismissing issues that affect women, like abortion, if you really want to protect women, then bring perpetrators of sexual violence to justice, stop granting criminals impunity, create a society where women have both public and private agency, legalise equal pay for women, and build facilities for working mothers. Be allies, not antagonists.

Meghna Pant is a multiple award-winning and bestselling author, screenwriter, columnist and speaker, whose latest novel BOYS DON’T CRY (Penguin Random House) will soon be seen on screen.