The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (30 page)

“The actual murder of little girls has in a great measure ceased, but it has been replaced in some tribes by a degree of carelessness hardly less criminal,” one observer wrote toward the end of the 1800s. “It is found in some districts that, when fever is prevalent, girls’ deaths, especially in the first three years of life, so largely exceed those of males that it is impossible not to believe that but small attempts are made to save the girls, and in many places deaths caused by disease of the lungs or malnutrition suggest the same conclusion.”
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The care deficit has never been eliminated, but it seemed to have been improving throughout the twentieth century, and in India in the 1950s and 1960s there were almost as many female children as male.
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Even Punjab saw a sustained increase in girls relative to boys. That’s why the publication of India’s 2001 census came as such a painful shock. Girls and women were living longer thanks to increased medical care, but the sex ratio had nonetheless gone seriously askew.
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In seventy districts, the ratio of girls to boys had declined by more than 50 points in the previous decade.
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With 798 female children for every thousand males, Punjab had the worst sex ratio in India, and Fatehgarh Sahib, with a sex ratio of 766, was the worst district in Punjab.

The decline was overwhelmingly due to the epidemic spread of sex-selective abortion, which most people in India refer to as “female feticide.” Sex determination tests first appeared in India in the 1970s through the use of amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling, both relatively invasive procedures that had to be done by a doctor. It wasn’t until ultrasound, which spread throughout the country in the 1990s, that sex determination became easy and accessible. According to a 2006 study by
The Lancet,
a conservative estimate is that there are half a million sex-selective abortions in India each year.
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“Ultrasound really came as a WMD,” said Puneet Bedi, a Delhi gynecologist who is one of the country’s most vocal activists against sex selection. “Parts of India where there is no drinking water or flush toilets, you can find ultrasound. They have no electricity—they carry their own car batteries.” Ultrasound can only detect sex at around four months, meaning sex-selective abortions are usually late-term abortions, a more complicated, dangerous procedure than early abortions. It doesn’t matter: Some women go through them over and over again, sacrificing their bodies for a boy.

General Electric, which dominates India’s ultrasound market in concert with the Indian company Wipro, provided cheap credit to help practitioners buy the machines. “The present marketing strategy of GE-WIPRO to target smaller towns is a matter of concern,” wrote Sabu George, a leading anti-sex selection activist.

Once a private practitioner in a small town buys a machine then there is great pressure on other doctors to buy. Multiple machines where there is little demand for legitimate prenatal care increases competition, reduces scan rates and motivates abuses like fetal sex determination so that clinics can recover their investment.... At the global level, it is imperative that those concerned with human rights expose the transnational corporations involved in marketing ultrasound machines for these purposes.
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But the bitter problem of the missing girls cannot simply be laid at the door of even the most callous corporate behemoth. The sins of capitalism may exacerbate it, but behind it are fantastically complex hierarchies of the world’s most multifarious country, where feudalism and technocapitalism, extreme superstition and hypermodernity, purdah and professional women all coexist. Even as it highlights the desperate need for women’s empowerment, sex-selective abortion sometimes looks, in a bizarre way, like a symptom of it. For reproductive rights advocates the whole issue has a looking-glass quality to it. It is a moral labyrinth that leads everyone but absolutists to sometimes uncomfortable and contradictory positions.

“You’re going to get multiple opinions on everything on this,” said Ena Singh, UNFPA’s assistant representative in India and a particularly impassioned combatant against sex-selective abortion. (The day I met her a major Punjabi pop star, Rabbi Shergill, surprised her in her office; she had convinced him to make sex selection the theme of a new music video, which was about to debut on Indian TV.)

You’re going to get multiple opinions on terminology; you’re going to get multiple opinions on policy; you’re going to get multiple opinions about rights, choice, gender, the way the law should be framed, the way it should be implemented, who should be implementing it. Because this issue is so fundamental, it’s so deep, it impacts everything. It’s about men and women—about every aspect of that relationship. It’s about existence; it’s about marriage; it’s about love; it’s about sex; it’s about children; it’s about globalization; it’s about economics; it’s about rights; it’s about norms; it’s about the media; it’s about crime; it’s about medicine; it’s about medical ethics; it’s about dowry; it’s about property; and a hundred other things. Tell me what this is not about!

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ccording to Amarjit Singh, a thirty-one-year-old family planning field-worker from Fatehgarh Sahib, ultrasound exploded throughout his area in 1994. “Even remote villages knew about it,” he said. Infamous advertisements went up across the region: “Spend 500 Rupees today and save 500,000 Rupees later.” The numbers were a reference to the sometimes crushing cost of dowry, the main reason Indians give for the misery that commonly greets the birth of girls. Amarjit
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remembers salesmen traveling to Punjabi villages touting the wonders of the new innovations. The same year India passed a law banning sex-determination tests for the purpose of sex-selective abortion, but it was widely ignored. “Everything was practiced very openly,” said Amarjit.

A tall man with an easy smile and a shadow of a beard, Amarjit donates some of his time to the Voluntary Health Association of Punjab, the primary NGO addressing sex-selective abortion in that state. Like most of the district’s residents he’s a Sikh, though he long ago cut his hair and stopped wearing a turban except on special occasions. Sikhs have the worst sex ratio of all the groups in India, and the worst among the Sikhs are the Jat Sikhs, the land-owning caste that Amarjit belongs to.

He recalled an old chant he heard from relatives. Decades before he was born, when infanticide was committed openly, it was sung by those killing girl babies.

Eat the jaggery
Spin the cotton
You should not come
Send your brother

Today Amarjit is as active an opponent of sex selection as one is likely to find in Fatehgarh Sahib. He has allied himself with Manmohan Sharma, the founder of the Voluntary Health Association of Punjab, a frail, ardently committed social scientist who has dedicated the last fifteen years to combating his state’s inequities, particularly those arising from sex discrimination. Amarjit insists that the mind-set that values men over women must be wiped out. And yet, less than twenty minutes after we first met, he explained to me why, in certain cases, he supports “female feticide.”

“Supposing somebody has three, four, five girl children. In that case I think it’s right that they plan a female feticide,” he said. “You cannot change the idea of that woman who has three daughters. She keeps producing children in hopes of producing a son. So I think in such a situation it is acceptable. Sometimes in hopes of a son they produce too many girl children. They have no proper nutrition, education, or security. In that situation, it is very painful. Girls will be maltreated. They will not get good husbands.”

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he problem of sex-selective abortion is not, of course, limited to India. Across Asia it is reshaping the population in unprecedented ways. In most populations around 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. Male infants are weaker and more susceptible to illness, leading ratios to even out over time. The arrival of sex-selection technology has profoundly disrupted this equilibrium. According to the UNFPA, in 2005 six Asian countries reported imbalances of more than 108 male children for every 100 females: India, South Korea, Georgia, Azerbaijan, China, and Armenia. In China and India the situation has clearly deteriorated since the 1980s. “The fact that the child sex ratio has unexpectedly increased is going to influence the entire population over the coming decades: the entire population will gradually grow increasingly more masculine in their make-up, as the new generations born after the 1980s grow older,” demographer Christophe Z. Guilmoto wrote of Asia.
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Immigration, meanwhile, has brought sex selection to the United States, Britain, and Canada, where advertisements for sex determination have appeared in newspapers aimed at the Indian diaspora.
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A 2008 article in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
documented skewed sex ratios among the children of Chinese, Korean, and Indian parents in the United States. “Using the 2000 U.S. Census, we find that the sex ratio of the oldest child to be normal, but that of subsequent children to be heavily male if there was no previous son,” it said.
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But the problem of the missing girls has been especially confounding in India, one of the two countries in the world where it is most prevalent. In the other, China, widespread sex selection is happening in the context of government compulsion. That makes the solution easy enough to see: End the one-child policy. India’s situation is more complicated. It would be comforting to think that sex-selective abortion there is the product of poverty-driven desperation, of a kind of backwardness that could be remedied by development and education. Comforting, but wrong. In fact, while sex-selective abortion is sometimes motivated by economic need, other times it’s the product of a twisted kind of consumerism.

It is widely practiced by India’s emerging middle class, those with enough money and education to skirt the law and take advantage of technology. They fully embrace the two-child ideal that India’s government—with outside help—pushed for decades, but only on the condition that they have at least one son. In a modernizing but still rigidly patriarchal society, boys hold out the prospect of a lifetime of economic security for their parents, while girls, who will join the household of their in-laws, are widely seen as simply a drain on expenses.

Female education is a remedy for almost every form of discrimination against girls—except this one. Indeed, in much of India higher rates of female literacy are correlated with higher rates of sex-selective abortion. This contrasts with China, where urbanites and those with higher education have the most normal sex ratios—despite the fact that the one-child policy is enforced more strictly in the cities.
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The posh, leafy suburbs of South Delhi, full of gracious homes occupied by professional couples with multiple servants, have sex ratios well under 900 girls for every 1,000 boys.
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Bedi, a specialist in fetal medicine—and the father of two girls—has his practice there, in an elite neighborhood called Haus Kauz. He is a bearish man with a gray mustache, a Sikh from a caste, ironically, famous for female infanticide. A copy of the Dalai Lama’s poem “A Precious Human Life” hangs on the wall of his office. On his desktop is one of his anti-sex selection PowerPoint presentations, which begins with a quote from Malcolm X: “It isn’t that time is running out—time has run out!”

“This whole myth of somehow the poor women being forced to undergo sex determination and abortion is the biggest bullshit,” said Bedi. “Seventy percent of the women who come to me [asking for sex determination], their husbands or their families don’t even know that they’re coming. The first demand for female feticide comes from the mother herself.”

Bedi’s patients, of course, are hardly representative of Indian women. They represent the richest sliver of Indian society: As he himself says, no one else can afford him. If the problem of sex-selective abortion were confined to people like them, it would barely show up in censuses. Still, the fact that even such privileged women seek out sex selection says much about how entrenched the preference for sons is throughout Indian society.

Given that Bedi is a high-profile crusader against sex selection, it seems strange that any of his patients would ask him for help in finding out the sex of their fetuses. That they do is evidence of how much cynicism and corruption surrounds efforts to ban the practice. According to Bedi, most doctors who declaim against sex selection in public profit from it in private, a view I heard echoed by doctors in Punjab as well. He speaks about sex-selective abortion in the shrillest possible terms, calling it a genocide, a holocaust. Still, some women assume that he must not really mean it, that for the right price he’ll help them avoid the burden of girls.

Bedi exudes a poignant mix of urgency and fatalism; he believes that everything possible must be done to stop sex-selective abortion, and that none of his activism is having any impact at all. In the last fifteen years, he said, he has talked two women out of aborting female fetuses, one of whom was pregnant after a long period of infertility. Both of them come to see him every year or two to castigate him for ruining their lives. They come, he said, to “remind me what a mistake they made because they listened to me, while everybody in their peer group has sons, [women] who were also my patients but had gone to better doctors later and got sons and abortions, while they had not.”