Committee on PCPNDT Act wants every pregnant woman to be tracked right from conception to delivery and missed pregnancy investigated to check falling sex ratio
Committee on PCPNDT Act wants every pregnant woman to be tracked right from conception to delivery and missed pregnancy investigated to check falling sex ratio
If the doctors appointed on the central supervisory board by Union health ministry to fight against girl child abortions have their way, pregnant women might be put on a national-level tracking list soon.u00a0Last Friday, the committee of expert doctors appointed to advise the Union government on how to implement the Pre-conception Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act had a meeting in New Delhi. At this meeting, the doctors insisted that the government should start tracking all pregnancies across the country and ask all districts to prepare an audit of this data.
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Dr Sanjay Gupte, president of Federation of Gynaecological Societies of India (FOGSI) who is part of the committee, said, "The idea is to maintain a national-level database of all pregnant women. When a woman undergoes sonography for the first time and is confirmed to be pregnant, her data is immediately collected. And then there should be consistent followu00a0-- ups till the time of delivery. The idea is to know the outcome of the pregnancy and if there is an abortion then we should know the reason behind it."
According to doctors, currently all sonography clinics have to maintain a mandatory form wherein they enter sketchy data about women such as name, age, address and week of pregnancy. Health departments at district and corporation-level do check these forms to see whether they are filled in properly, but they don't do any tracking of pregnancies. "There is no point in having such a data on pregnant women. The dropping sex ratio needs an audit that will help us determine whether abortion was done deliberately or not. Depending on the details of sonography conducted, time and week of abortion, it can be tracked if abortion was sex selective or not," said Gupte.
Dr Rajiv Yeravdekar, dean of faculty of health sciences, Symbiosis International University and member of committee, said though the idea seemed ambitious but it can definitely be implemented. "We agree that we have no experience in tracking pregnancy at such level, but we are suggesting a step-wise escalation of the tracking system. We could start with better reporting by sonography centres, reporting by hospitals on pregnant women registered and institutional deliveries, gynaecologists and family physicians reporting on abortions among others. The idea is to get our manpower such as health workers, doctors, technicians sensitised and involved in reporting and tracking," he said.
Negative sex ratio
In the recent Census report, it was revealed that the sex ratio had declined from 909 girls (per 1000 boys) in the age group of 0 to 6 years in 2001 to 883 in 2011. Since implementation of the PCPNDT Act, 154 criminal cases have been filed in the state. And the city rules the charts with 34 cases followed by 26 cases registered in Ahmednagar.
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