I was reading a book last summer called May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India by Elisabeth Bumiller (yes, I know I'm an enormous nerd for reading this shit for fun) which was based on her journeys and research in India in the late 1980s. I don't know how much India has changed in recent years and haven't found a plethora of info on the subject on the Interwebz, but I found her discussions and findings on abortion in India particularly interesting.
Abortion in India was legalized in August 1971, a year and half before the U.S. got around to it, and passed with only two hours of debate in Parliament. A woman's right to safe, legal abortion hasn't really come under fire in India as it has in the U.S., and likely passed so easily because of the government's desperate need for another form of family planning in a country whose population was exploding.
Amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling, prenatal tests used in the U.S. primarily to screen for possible genetic abnormalities, were commonly used in India in the 1980s only to determine the sex of an unborn child. It's estimated that between the years 1978-1982, approximately 78,000 female fetuses were aborted after the "sex test" was administered (the process has now been formally banned for the use of sex determination).
Some working-class Indians sought out the test because they feared that they would never be able to afford another daughter's dowry (disgustingly, some clinics took advanatage of this fear by offering amniocentesis at low prices and using slogans like "Better 500 rupees now than 500,000 later!"). Some mothers even said they did it because they didn't want to raise a daughter who would face the same hard life they did. Other couples who might've been able to afford another daughter cited the shame that mothers feel for not having a son, for the cultural push to produce that boy. As Bumiller points out, between the years of 1978-1982, a study of a hospital in Bombay by a women's group found that of 8000 women who came in for the sex test, 7999 wanted a son.
Let that sink in for a second.
While I won't impose my Western cultural views on a country I know admittedly little about, I want to address the intellectual mind fuck that this brings up for me.
On the one hand, I deeply believe that all women should be able to end a pregnancy they do not want for whatever reasons they may hold. On the other hand, I am disgusted as a feminist and as a woman and potential mother that doctors allow(ed) and even encourage(d) this practice of elimnating female fetuses based on gender alone. I think it's very telling that this first time I wrote that sentence, I wrote "this practice of killing off female fetuses." I do not usually conceive of abortion (especially in the early stages of pregnancy) as murder, but when it's done for the express reasons of wanting a son based on patriarchal demands, my knee-jerk reaction is that it's almost a slaughter.
Cognitive dissonance much?
A doctor Bumiller interviewed notes that it is better to abort a female fetus than for a couple to abandon their day-old baby girl, and I absolutely agree. But I still have trouble reconciling my feminist ideals of every woman's right to legal, safe abortion with the disturbing sexism in sex-based abortion.
Anyone out there having better luck reconciling these two opposing ideas?
Much love,
The Albright Sheriff
Yeah, that's a toughie. To me, the ideal solution would be to change the culture so that daughters would be as desirable (and inexpensive) as sons, but that gets into the dangerous territory of imposing our "superior" western ideals on their culture. There's no shortage of instances where western, educated women like us have to choose between supporting women's rights or people's right to their own cultures. What an excellent post!
ReplyDelete-Tara