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

This paper will contextualise the contemporary concern over sex selectionSex selection once rendered as “missing womenWomen”. Though Amartya Sen’s famous article in the New York Review of Books “More than one hundred million womenWomen are missing” in 1990 is thought to have been seminal in bringing the phenomenon to the notice of socialSocial scientists, India has contended with a long historyHistory on the subject. Beginning in the colonial period when British officials encountered practices of female infanticide and saw genderGender 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 ratiosSex ratio which continued to decline after independence. A new moment in this historyHistory comes with the women’sWomen movement’s discovery of the annexation of amniocentesis testing for sex determinationSex 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 familiesFamily” aspiring to have the rightRights kind of familyFamily of one boy and one girl. While dominant approaches to sex selection,Sex selection see it as the core of Indian cultureCulture (sonSon preference); or alternatively as part of the continuum of violenceViolence against womenWomen, I suggest that the lens of political economyPolitical economy might have its own insights to offer, and that genderGender is becoming more complex than simple accounts of sonSon preference and daughterDaughter aversion would suggest.