The bio-politics of population control and sex-selective abortion in China and India

Abstract

China and India, two countries with skewed sex ratios in favor of males, have introduced a wide range of policies over the past few decades to prevent couples from deselecting daughters, including criminalizing sex-selective abortion (SSA) through legal jurisdiction. This article aims to analyse how such policies are situated within the bio-politics of population control and how some of the outcomes reflect each government's inadequacy in addressing the social dynamics around abortion decision-making and the social, physical, and psychological effects on women's wellbeing in the face of criminalization of SSA. The analysis finds that overall, the criminalization of sex selection has not been successful in these two countries. Further, the broader economic, social, and cultural dynamics which produce bias against females must be a part of the strategy to combat sex selection, rather than a narrow criminalization of abortion which endangers women's access to safe reproductive health services and their social, physical, and psychological wellbeing.

Sex Selective Abortion, Neoliberal Patriarchy and Structural Violence in India

“…From the mid-1990s, alongside pursuing a Malthusian approach towards population control, the Indian government embarked on stigmatising female 'de-selection' by employing the label kurimaru (transl. daughter-killing) to states showing a low sex ratio in its official This is the accepted version of a forthcoming article that will be published in Feminist Review by Palgrave Macmillan: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/journal/41305 Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/25115/ discourse on SSA in order to encourage states to achieve set targets to improve their respective ratios (Eklund and Purewal 2017).…”

“…Source: Census of India (2011) cited in Eklund and Purewal (2017) The inability of the criminalisation of SSA to increase or improve the sex ratio can be best understood by the resilience of broader structures producing son preferring, sex selection (Eklund and Purewal 2017). The bio-politics of SSA in India has been shaped by several factors: the ascent of neoliberalism at the level of economic, social and political organisation which presents human reproduction as a key element of control and productivity; the reliance of the household and family on traditional patriarchal notions of 'security' through patrimony making sons an essential financial income-earning asset in the absence of state welfare; and state policies which seek to frame a discourse on the sex ratio which avoids addressing these structural dimensions.…”

‘Gendercide’, abortion policy, and the disciplining of prenatal sex-selection in neoliberal Europe

“…Furthermore, as discussed further on in this article, focusing on SSA takes focus away from the biomedical concern over choosing the sex of the child through pre-implantation and pre-conception sex-selection, which is becoming increasingly available as a means to sex-select, at least for those who can afford it (Eklund and Purewal, 2017). Plans to include the abortion amendment into the Serious Crime Bill sought to criminalise SSA on the basis of evidence that South Asian women (specifically Indiaborn women) showed a propensity to undergo sex-selective diagnostic and abortive procedures (Dubuc and Coleman, 2007).…”

“…10 Hence, national abortion law in the UK was being challenged as being insufficient to address the reproductive behaviour of women from migrant backgrounds who, in the process, had become identified as 'deviant aborters' both from inside and outside of South Asian communities. The Serious Crime Bill, including other measures of criminalisation, such as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and other forms of VAW, became an issue for the British state to sharpen its disciplinary function without addressing broader issues of social welfare, support for vulnerable groups, or social equity, as we have argued elsewhere (Eklund and Purewal, 2017). Instead, women's reproductive choice more broadly became subject to scrutiny by the anti-abortion lobby, for what it argued was an ambiguity within the 1967 abortion legislation which technically did not legalise abortions, but instead provided a legal defence for those carrying them out.…”

“…Rather it was revealed to be a matter for discussion at the level of communities, organisations, and the UK National Health Service (NHS), where sex selection and discrimination against female children, before and after birth, could more effectively be addressed. To argue that SSA is not an issue for communities, and women with pressures to have sons, would simply be an omission (Eklund and Purewal, 2017). Also, attention to the 'iron fist' of the state in relation to SSA also requires a necessary examination of the 'invisible hand' of the market (Wacquant, 2011) which not only sells and provides SSA services but, where cultural and economic biases against females exist, also places overt, coercive, and/or indirect pressure on women to 'produce' sons ( Figures 2 and 3).…”