In India, men outnumber women by 8%.  In most western countries, women outnumber men by 3%.

What could cause this discrepancy?  A number of factors, but according to most experts in India, one of the causes of the 882 females for every 1,000 males in India is anti-female selective reproductive procedures.  This can include anything from termination of a female foetus due to an ultrasound, to female infanticide.  The Guardian recently published an excellent article on the subject, delving into issues of patriarchy, the culture of marriage, and resulting trafficking due to the shortage of women in many parts of India.  I could write an entire post on the article itself, but that’s not what this is about.

 

 The article compelled me to once again mentally hash out my pro-choice views.  I’m fiercely pro-choice and feminist, I wholeheartedly support Gloria Steinem’s famous words, “In my heart, I think a woman has two choices.  Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.”  But mass termination of female foetuses is decidely anti-feminist—and more than that, reeks of eugenics.  Yet, I am fiercely pro-choice.

I am PRO-CHOICE, and ANTI-SELECTION.  This means that although I will fight to guarantee a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, I do not fundamentally believe that as a soceity, abortion should be an excuse for eugenic-related selection--for example, an aversion to having a female child, or because the child will be born with certain mental or physical disabilities.

This may seem like a contradiction, and in a way it is.  But what I'm arguing for is not a change in policy or legislature.  South Asian women who are persuaded (or coerced) by patriarchy will not cease having abortions of female foetuses simply because it's illegal (which it already is in India).  Rather, we need to change the culture and attitudes towards raising "undesirable" children, which is a much more difficult, but is a much more necessary task.

Oone of the reasons that marginalized women have been so averse to the "pro-choice movement" is because of our collective experience with eugenics, selection and related manipulation of our reproductive functions.  It is no secret that women of color, disabled women, and working class women have had horrendous experiments and policies carried out on us, whether it was experiments on enslaved women by the so-called "Father of Gynecology," mass sterilization of indigenous women, or the experimental use of Depo-Provera over women in the Global South.  This did not happen that far in the past; many women who have been the victims of such policies are still living today.  But the mainstream, white-middle class-dominated pro-choice movement focused so much on the right to terminate a pregnancy that it failed to assess the reproductive needs of women whose primary concerns might be something other than the immediate outcome of Roe v. Wade.

It is impossible for someone else to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy for another women.  Who's to say that an abortion is justified in the case of a foetus that tests positive for anencephaly and not in the case of a foetus that tests positive for Down's Syndrome?  No one can make that call but the mother.  But calling attention to the fact that one of our justifications for terminating the pregnancy of a foetus that, although might be developmentally challenged, would be able to grow and thrive, is that society's scorn would be worse than non-existence for the foetus--that shows that something is very wrong in our culture.  And it needs to be addressed.

As feminists, it is important that we have these discussions among ourselves.  We need to confront the history of the family planning and pro-choice movement, and own up to the fact that some of the early justifications for contraception and abortion were essentially eugenics.  Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was an open eugenicist.  The contemporary pro-choice movement also needs to move away from using selection-related language and rhetoric, because it is alienating and it is offensive.  Challenging the conditions of our society that make the pro-choice movement necessary does not in any way dilute the necessity or relevance of reproductive justice.  It only serves to make the movement for women's health and self-determination all the more powerful.