Former health minister Dr Fuad Khan says the time has come for the Government to determine its policy on the termination of pregnancies because of the Zika virus.
He made the comment yesterday, hours after Health Minister Terrance Deyalsingh confirmed that a 23-year-old pregnant Belmont woman had been diagnosed with Zika.
“Now we have to brace the topic of abortions and the legality of abortions, the necessity of abortions,” Khan said.
There have been reports of the babies of women who had contracted Zika being affected by microcephaly, a condition in which a baby is born with a very small head and a damaged brain.
Speaking in his capacity as a medical doctor following yesterday’s sitting of the House of Representatives, Khan said he had seen “quite a lot of women who did not have abortions ... and came out with abnormal babies because of the illegality of such a procedure.”
Khan said as a result of the serious threat to the pregnancy through contracting Zika, both the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of the Attorney General must make a policy on the issue of the termination of pregnancies in T&T.
“They have to come up with a policy and they can’t run from it anymore, because in the past we did not have Zika and microcephaly in pregnant women,” he added.
Khan said the new People’s National Movement Cabinet must address the issue of abortion, since the situation could force some women to seek back door abortions to terminate their pregnancies because of the threat of microcephaly.
Asked to respond to Deyalsingh’s announcement of protocols to be implemented next week in the wake of the latest Zika case involving a pregnant woman, Khan joked: “The only protocol I can see is to ask the mosquitoes not to bite people. Maybe that’s the protocol he is thinking about.”
He later said Zika protocols for pregnant women should have been implemented a long time ago.
Khan insisted that the PNM Government has to address the fact that Zika is a real problem, adding that the issue of the termination of pregnancies must not be swept under the carpet.
In response to another question, Khan said is need to provide more financial resources to the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) to do its work.