Sex Selection, Family Building Strategies and the Political Economy of Gender

Abstract

AbstractThis paper will contextualise the contemporary concern over sex selection once rendered as “missing women”. Though Amartya Sen’s famous article in the New York Review of Books “More than one hundred million women are missing” in 1990 is thought to have been seminal in bringing the phenomenon to the notice of social scientists, India has contended with a long history on the subject. Beginning in the colonial period when British officials encountered practices of female infanticide and saw gender skews in the first Censuses, Indian demographers in the late 1960s and 1970s were bedevilled by the conundrum of long term worsening trends in overall sex ratios which continued to decline after independence. A new moment in this history comes with the women’s movement’s discovery of the annexation of amniocentesis testing for sex determination of the foetus and its subsequent normalisation through pre-natal ultrasound as part of ordinary maternal care during a pregnancy. I argue that this new moment is distinctive in the Indian context in more than one way: it is urban-led and most visible among non-poor “small families” aspiring to have the right kind of family of one boy and one girl. While dominant approaches to sex selection, see it as the core of Indian culture (son preference); or alternatively as part of the continuum of violence against women, I suggest that the lens of political economy might have its own insights to offer, and that gender is becoming more complex than simple accounts of son preference and daughter aversion would suggest.