Vidhara

The Indian Penal Code, 1860

§91Exclusion of acts which are offences independently of harm cause

The exceptions in sections 87, 88 and 89 do not extend to acts which are offences independently of any harm which they may cause, or be intended to cause, or be known to be likely to cause, to the person giving the consent, or on whose behalf the consent is given. Illustration Causing miscarriage (unless caused in good faith for the purpose of saving the life of the woman) is offence independently of any harm which it may cause or be intended to cause to the woman. Therefore, it is not an offence “by reason of such harm”; and the consent of the woman or of her guardian to the causing of such miscarriage does not justify the act.

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Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Indian Penal Code, 1860 (45 of 1860), English PDF (A1860-45.pdf) retrieved via Internet Archive Wayback Machine snapshot 2020-04-21 of indiacode.nic.in (portal unreachable from ingest network). Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser on 2026-07-15. Repealed by BNS 2023 w.e.f. 2024-07-01. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Eleven State-inserted sections that had been published as central law were removed on 2026-08-02 after the D-052 guard identified them: 354E, 376F, 509A and 509B (Chhattisgarh Act 25 of 2015), 379A and 379B (Gujarat Act 6 of 2019) and 382B-382F (Tripura Act 4 of 2019). They are now recorded as State amendments against the sections they attach to, not as sections of the Code (D-053).

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