Indian Professor Demands Removal of '2-Finger Virginity Test' From Medical Books

07:58 GMT, 4 January 2019

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The ‘chastity test’ checks for whether a woman's hymen is intact or not fosters a false assumption that the membrane can only be torn during sexual intercourse. Women can have abnormal hymens featuring things like large openings or lacerations, even if they have never been sexually active.

Sputnik

A reputable professor of forensic science from the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences at Sewagram in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Dr. Indrajit Khandekar, has contacted the Union Ministry of Health; he hopes to see the ‘two-finger test' for virginity removed from the medical curriculum.

Remove "virginity test" form the medical curriculum. It has no scientific basis. Dr Indrajit Khandekar, professor of forensic medicine at Mahatma Gandhi… https://t.co/VwtJvAe2Fm

— C.P.Geevan (@cpgeevan) December 30, 2018

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Dr. Khandekar has also written to the Medical Council of India (MCI), the Union Ministry of Woman and Child Development, and the Registrar of the Maharashtra University (MoU) of Health Sciences. An MCI official confirmed to Sputnik that proper procedure will be followed while taking the suggestion into consideration.

In his statement, Dr. Khandekar claimed that the test has no scientific relevance and does not have the justification required for concluding whether or not a woman has had sexual intercourse or not. For that matter, he thinks, the test corroborates conclusively with a woman's sexual history.

According to Dr. Khandekar, the virginity test violates the basic human rights of those undergoing the procedure. It makes the examinee undergo traumatic stress, both physically and psychologically. The tests have also result in embarrassing but totally unnecessary perceptions in the minds of doctors, the judiciary and the general public and irreversibly damage the woman examined, he added.