The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (32 page)

After protests from women’s groups, the government of India banned sex tests in public hospitals in 1976. Within a few years, though, private clinics offering sex determination appeared. In the mid 1980s a study commissioned by anti-sex-selection activists found that 84 percent of gynecologists in Bombay were performing amniocentesis for sex determination. “A majority of the doctors thought the sex-determination tests were a humane service for women who did not want any more daughters, and some even felt that they could be an important family planning device for our country,” the activists wrote.
¹⁹
At one city hospital, of 8,000 abortions following amniocentesis, 7,999 were of female fetuses.
²⁰

Through the efforts of feminist organizers, the state of Maharashtra, where Bombay is located, outlawed sex-determination tests in 1988, and the central government followed suit in 1994. But sex-selective abortion was too popular to control. Most people are willing to leave their first child up to chance, but after one or two daughters they take matters into their own hands. “[I]t is with regards to later pregnancies among sonless couples that SRB [sex-ratio at birth] values tend to surge,” wrote Guilmoto. “Parents want to avoid the ‘worst-case’ scenario—i.e., a family without a son.”
²¹
Following the 2001 census the government made the anti-sex-selection law more stringent, and as a result prices went up, but other than that there was little evidence that people were being deterred.

A
lthough feminists have taken a leading role in India’s anti-sex-selection campaign, it’s a supremely tricky issue for those who care deeply about abortion rights. Women’s rights activists with experience in Western countries worry that the language of the campaign is shading into the idiom of the Western antiabortion movement. “Murder in the Womb” was the title of a six-part exposé aired on the national news channel
Sahara Samay
. Educational posters, produced by the government and by local NGOs, show swords and daggers pointed at fetuses. The almost universal use of the term “female feticide” or, in Hindi,
kanya bhronn hatya,
which literally means “the killing of young girls,” begs the question of why feticide in general is OK.

Abortion up to twenty weeks was legalized in India in 1971 as part of the country’s attempt to control population growth. It was never about women’s rights. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act allows abortion for a wide range of reasons, including failure of contraception, but it is the doctor, not the woman, who has the right to decide whether an abortion is warranted. Unlike the legalization of abortion in the United States, the MTP Act wasn’t associated with any sort of social upheaval or disruption in gender roles— premarital sex remained as taboo as ever, and notions of wifely obedience as deeply engrained. That’s likely why it passed without controversy, and why India has never had a serious antiabortion movement.

Yet while abortion is legal, unsafe abortion remains a major problem; in many places safe services either aren’t available or aren’t known, leading millions of women to seek abortions from traditional midwives and unqualified quacks. Research in the mid-1990s showed botched abortions were responsible for 13 percent of India’s staggeringly high maternal mortality rate.
²²

Most abortions in India are for unwanted pregnancies, not sex selection .
²³
Still, with the campaign against sex-selective abortion injecting the idea of fetal rights into the public conversation as never before, there was reason to fear that efforts to expand access to safe abortion would be hurt. “The biggest danger, which is the one we’re dealing with right now, is that the anti-sex-selection campaigns not turn into antiabortion campaigns,” said Gita Sen, the longtime women’s rights activist and Cairo lobby veteran.

Dr. Sharad Iyengar and his wife, Dr. Kirti Iyengar, run an NGO called Action Research and Training for Health in the poor desert state of Rajasthan. They provide child immunizations, family planning, and prenatal care and safe delivery, running two friendly and basic but clean clinics that are open twenty-four hours a day for people in the surrounding villages. Thanks to a scheme meant to reduce India’s maternal mortality, women are paid cash to have their babies in government hospitals, but some of the poor women ARTH serves would rather forgo that money and instead pay a nominal fee to ARTH to deliver at their centers, where they’re treated with care and dignity.

Safe abortion is an important part of ARTH’s work; health volunteers in the villages steer women away from the quacks, who are known as “Bengali doctors,” and rotating gynecologists perform both manual vacuum aspiration and medical abortions at its clinics. These services are crucial. On a scorching April day in 2008 I visited a village where ARTH works, in a hilly, marble-mining area in Rajasthan’s south. A small group of illiterate women, dressed brightly and wearing big, beaded nose rings and tarnished silver ankle bracelets, sat on the dusty ground around an ARTH employee using a specially designed picture book to teach them about reproductive and child health. One woman quickly volunteered that before ARTH local women used to seek abortions from a nearby practitioner “who gave some tablets and used some instruments.” There was a lot of pain and bleeding, but they wouldn’t tell anyone or go to the hospital. A young woman in a green sari—a teenager, or a little older—added that her mother died after taking some abortifacient plants given by a local
dai,
or midwife.

According to Sharad Iyengar, the campaign against sex-selective abortion has had a chilling effect on legitimate abortion providers in Rajasthan. “There is stigmatization of abortion. A lot of providers have become averse to providing abortion services,” he said. “Some gynecologists are now against abortions. Those who do it, do it quietly—they’re not ready to talk about it. The public health dimensions of unsafe abortion never were on the agenda.”

Elsewhere in India enterprising local officials tackled the problem of sex selection by targeting women who had had abortions. Krishan Kumar, deputy commissioner of the Nawanshahr district of Punjab, made national news for his success in combating sex-selective abortion. Partly, he did it through an impressive crackdown on illegal ultrasound operations and unscrupulous doctors. One gynecologist arrested during his reign, back at work after Kumar was transferred, told me with obvious self-pity that Kumar had been a “dictator.” The gynecologist remained unapologetic: Anyone with a daughter should be allowed sex determination for her next pregnancy, he insisted, adding, “In no situation should there be a third child.”

But Kumar also humiliated many women, organizing groups of volunteers to stage loud, public mourning ceremonies outside the homes of women thought to have had sex-selective abortions. “Two days ago when news came that an unborn girl had been murdered in her mother Manjit Kaur’s womb, hundreds of villagers wearing white assembled outside Manjit Kaur’s house and took out a ‘funeral procession,’ ” reported the
Times of India,
noting that “sadness was writ large in the eyes of Manjit, who is already a mother of a three-year-old daughter.”
²⁴

F
eminists have been understandably alarmed. They’ve struggled against the phrase “female feticide,” but it is used so widely that even the UNFPA sometimes employs it, prioritizing effective grassroots communication over global abortion politics. Worse, in local efforts, “female” is sometimes dropped. Official campaigns against “feticide” are especially problematic, given that many rural Indians are already unaware that abortion is legal.
²⁵

Some campaigners dismiss anxieties about abortion rights as a Western projection, noting that India has never had a real antiabortion movement. “Please understand, in this country there was no pro-life, pro-choice debate,” said Bedi. “Nobody has ever fought for fetal rights. The medical profession has not. The ethicists have not. The temples and the gurudawaras have not. So to say that any voice against [sex-selective abortion] will give vent to the pro-lifers and hence restrict the reproductive choice of a woman is ridiculous.”

Perhaps. But India
does
have pronatalist Hindu rightists, who have urged women to have more sons for the sake of communal demographic strength. The secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a hard-line Hindu nationalist group, encouraged every Hindu woman to become an
Ashtaputra,
or mother of eight sons. The leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the VHP’s parent organization, called on Hindu women to produce at least three sons each to ensure that Hindus do not become outnumbered by Muslims.
²⁶

With increasing efforts afoot to enlist religious figures in the fight against sex selection, some fear that they’ll start attacking abortion rather than the preference for sons. “One of India’s biggest pluses in being able to hold up women’s reproductive rights around abortion has always been that the religious dimension has never been very strong,” said Sen. “That doesn’t mean that with the Hindu fundamentalists running riot all over the country, some crackpot doesn’t pick that up.”

Sex selection poses an additional challenge to women’s rights activists, one that’s philosophical rather than tactical. To confront the issue of sex-selective abortion as a feminist is to see the world in much the same way pro-lifers do, at least for a moment. It’s to look in horror at a culture where potential life is tossed away in the quest for economic advancement and status, debasing all involved. It’s to see some choices as illegitimate.

The American antiabortion movement has relished pointing out the contradiction. “It is perhaps obvious why sex-selective abortion is an embarrassment to feminism: while the preference for sons is deeply rooted in history, the other factors, such as reduced family size and cultural acceptance of abortion, are central pillars of feminist thought,” wrote Douglas A. Sylva of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute in the
Weekly Standard
. “Since at least the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, feminist champions have argued that international ‘gender justice’ could only be established if women possessed the reproductive rights necessary to reduce their family sizes, thereby liberating them for higher education and successful careers.” It is never pleasant, he continued, “to admit that one’s revolutionaries have begun to devour their own.”
²⁷

There is indeed an inconsistency between believing in absolute reproductive choice and in wanting to outlaw abortions performed for the “wrong” reason. That’s why American feminists tend to see domestic attempts to ban sex selection as threats to
Roe v. Wade.
Indian feminists, though, have never prioritized the concept of choice the way Westerners do, in part because whatever choices Indian women face are so constrained. Women’s rights activists in India fight against the “choice” of families to pay dowry to marry their daughters off, and to both practice and glorify
sati,
in which living widows burn with their husbands on their funeral pyres.

“My own view is that the question of reproductive rights is much bigger than the question of just reproductive choice,” said Sen. “The language of choice, while it’s very useful in holding up individual rights, often misses that behind the way in which people make choices are a lot of social pressures, forces, relationships, and so on.” A woman’s choice to have a sex-selective abortion, said Sen, “may reflect the fact that she has very few rights.”

This approach doesn’t jibe with the debate about abortion in the United States, where rights and choice are seen as synonymous, and where feminists are constantly defending the right of women to make reproductive decisions unencumbered by others’ beliefs about what is best for them or for society. But it is not, obviously, the job of Indian feminists to map their politics onto the ideological topography of the West. There may be no overarching philosophy that can reconcile the two stances, except perhaps for solidarity between groups of women working in vastly different contexts.

D
istorted sex ratios pose a concrete threat to Indian women that goes beyond the disturbing demonstration of how little they are esteemed. Some have suggested, based on crude economic logic, that the deficit in women would raise their value. On the ground, this has not been the case. Already in northern India shortages of women have led to increases in sexual violence and trafficking for both marriage and prostitution. Though dowry has persisted unabated, men who can’t find wives have begun importing poor women from the country’s south and east, who then find themselves isolated in an alien culture where they don’t even speak the language and may be treated as little more than chattel.

Parts of Haryana, which borders Punjab and has India’s second-worst sex ratio, have witnessed a return of polyandry, in which one woman is shared among several brothers. In February 2006, Tripala Kurmari, an eighteen-year-old girl from one of India’s minority tribes, was murdered there. “The tribal girl was brought to Haryana by an agent who promised to get her a job,” wrote Gita Aravamudan, author of the book
Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Foeticide
. “She was ‘married’ to Ajmer Singh who desperately wanted a male heir. However, soon after her marriage she found she was expected to sleep with all his brothers. When she refused, he killed her. The murder of Tripala Kumari gave a gruesome face to a form of sexual exploitation which has become increasingly popular in the women-starved states of Punjab and Haryana.”
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And this was before the hardest-hit generation in those states reached adulthood.