Bharat Mata needs a morning-after pill

In India, we've seen a curious paradoxical pattern emerge over the last few years. The more we progress economically, the more we regress mentally, whether it is patriotism, pornography or the morning-after-pill. The richer we get, the dumber we are. We live in opulent mansions but our minds are in the provincial boondocks. There's a direct link between economic well-being and intellectual attrition.

Liberal democracies do not waste their time criminalising dissent on academic campuses. We do. Does raising slogans lead to the disintegration of Bharat Mata? But then we are not a full-fledged liberal democracy. As Ram Guha said: we are a 40:60 democracy. There were widespread protests on American campuses during the Vietnam War. Those students were not harassed by the police and the state for being unpatriotic and put behind bars.

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Liberal democracies do not obsess about banning pornography. The government banned 857 such sites, then lifted the ban. The Supreme Court Women Lawyers Welfare Association challenged this ban, citing a case where a bus driver and his assistant showed pornographic images to children and then molested them: "The sexual content that kids are accessing today is far more graphic, violent, brutal, deviant and destructive and has put the entire society in danger. The petitioner most respectfully submits that most of the offences committed against women/girls/children are fuelled by pornography."

Apparently, pornography is a threat to public order in India. For every person who watches porn and then goes on to commit a sexual crime, there are millions of others, both men and women, who don't. (Recent stats released by an adult website PornHub show that 30 per cent of the Indian visitors on their site are women, six per cent higher than the global average of women visitors). The rapists in the Nirbhaya case were also drunk when they committed the brutal act. Should we go ahead and clamp a nation-wide prohibition on the sale of liquor? We have made a habit of mistaking the woods for the trees.

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Meanwhile, in America, porn continues to evolve. At the world's biggest phone show, Mobile World Congress, Virtual Porn or VR porn was the buzzword. As Luke Johnson reports in Esquire: "The scenes feature serious visual depth and three-dimensionality. My mind told me to reach out and touch, but my invisible arms were grabbing nothing but air... By the time the second scene rolled around I was starting to feel like I was viewing it through my own eyes. The first person perspective meant I was no longer just watching porn, I was experiencing it too." VR porn offers release and might actually lead to lesser crime.

We repeatedly fall prey to the logical fallacy, which in philosophy is called false cause: "The fallacy committed when an argument mistakenly attempts to establish a causal connection."

There are two types of this fallacy. The first one, post hoc ergo propter hoc, says that mere succession in time is not enough to establish causal connection: "Hair precedes the growth of teeth in babies, so the growth of hair causes the growth of teeth".

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The second one, non causa pro causa, is the fallacy of making a mistake about the ascription of some cause to an effect: event X is followed by (or related to) event Y. Therefore, event X caused event Y. The tongue-in-cheek example here would be: "Napoleon became a great emperor because he was short".

It's the same fallacy that has led to the banning of the morning-after pill in Tamil Nadu almost ten years ago. TV spots for the same were also taken off air nationwide. (This is like being in 19th century America when a series of state laws were passed criminalising the sale of birth control solutions.) The fear in TN was that morning-after pills will lead to more promiscuity among the young and a loosening of the moral fabric.

As noted historian Elaine Tyler May argues in her book, America and the Pill, it makes little sense to say that the pill "caused" the sexual revolution. The revolution had already happened. As a physician tells her: "The pill does not make people decide to have sex. It is after they decide to have sex that they go get the pill."

In the absence of over-the-counter morning-after pills, unwanted pregnancies have boomed in TN. Women take abortion pills without medical supervision, often with disastrous consequences. According to a recent report in TOI, almost 40 per cent of women who underwent abortions came with complications after taking these pills without prescription. Abortions turn septic, requiring blood transfusions and surgery. It looks like Tamil women are still having sex.

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In our typical hypocritical fashion, we have decided that morning- after pills are bad but abortion is okay. In countries like Ireland and America, at least the pro-lifers have an argument - the right of the unborn child. Here it is not about human rights, but about women's morality slipping. No one is even talking about the psychological consequences of these preventable abortions, both on women and men.

In America, the pill enabled women to plan and space pregnancies, allowing them to pursue educational and professional opportunities. Loretta Lynn, the country music star, sang about these freedoms in the 1975 hit "The Pill". The husband in the song has his nights on the town, while the wife sits at home nursing another pregnancy. Not anymore: "All these years I've stayed at home/While you had all your fun/And every year that's gone by/Another baby's come/ There's a gonna be some changes made/ Right here on nursery hill/ You've set this chicken your last time/ 'Cause now I've got the pill."

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)