Nagpur: The Nagpur police have booked an e-commerce portal for selling medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) kits and abortion medicines allegedly without prescription in parts of Maharashtra. The police action follows detection of illegal sale of abortion drugs by Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), reports said.
Similarly, cases were registered at various police stations in Mumbai, Thane, Jalgaon, Kolhapur, Aurangabad apart from Nagpur based on the complaint lodged by the FDA officials. According to FDA, the administration had received information that abortion drugs were being sold illegally on Meesho.com, an online portal. For the purpose of verification, orders were placed for MTP kits without prescription in various parts of the state by the FDA personnel, who acted as decoy customers.
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Monday 07 Oct. 2024
Reports said that the portal sells cosmetic products, jewellery, apparels and some other items. In its beauty and health section, products related to make-up, wellness and skin-care are available. No section on drugs is visible on its homepage. But when the word MTP is typed in the search window, options like MTP abortion kit, MTP kit tablets, MTP pills become visible. After selecting one of these options, the page displays images of abortion kits of some pharma companies, the FDA release said.
When orders were placed by the FDA personnel online, they were accepted without the doctors’ prescription. As ordered, a total of 16 MTP kits were received through courier parcels in parts of the state. These kits were manufactured by a leading pharma company, and were distributed from Varanasi, Agra and Delhi.
Experts have sounded caution against the illegal sale of medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) or abortion kits, whether over-the-counter or online. Such procedures done at home without a doctor’s supervision can be life-threatening. Also, failed attempts to abort with an MTP kit may lead to infertility, they said.
