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“There is such a thing as too many daughters, but not too many sons”: A qualitative study of son preference and fetal sex selection among Indian immigrants in the United States [1]

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Date: 2011-04-01  

Sex selection is a practice historically prevalent in societies that express a strong desire for sons. The cultural basis for son preference may include the necessity or utility of male offspring for manual labor, war, elder care, property inheritance, continuation of the family name or blood line, and/or avoidance of the expense of dowries. In addition to its direct influence on sex-selective terminations and female infanticide, son preference also impacts how parents allocate food, money, and other resources after birth, resulting in greater female childhood mortality due to starvation and illness (Dasgupta, 1987, Miller, 1997, Pande and Malhotra, 2006). In Asia, son preference and sex selection are intertwined phenomena, most visibly in India and China, countries with long-standing histories of female infanticide (Croll, 2000, Greenhalgh, 2008).

More recently, there has been increasing attention from demographers, economists, and journalists towards the use of biomedical technology for sex selection in South Asia. With estimates that there may be over ten million “missing” women in India alone (Jha et al., 2006), health organizations and women’s groups have cited the cultural pressure to have sons as contributory to sex selection, which has been considered a form of violence against women and girls (Dagar, 2001, Fair, 1996, Kishwar, 1995, Patel, 1989). In 1994 and 2003 the Indian government implemented legislation prohibiting the use of ultrasound and sperm sorting technologies used explicitly for sex selection. In contrast, sex determination and selective abortion, as well as pre-implantation sex selection technologies, are legal in the United States. Although there is ample exploration of the ways medical technologies can influence gender hierarchies and notions of empowerment (Franklin and Roberts, 2006, Saetnan et al., 2000), and there are numerous qualitative studies of this in the context of reproductive choice (Beck-Gernsheim, 1989, Becker, 2000, Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995, Inhorn, 2003), there is little known ethnographically about how new reproductive technologies are used specifically for sex selection in the United States.

South Asian families immigrating to the U.S. thus find themselves in an environment where reproductive choice is protected by law and a number of technologies enabling sex selection are readily available. In this context, then, how do women exposed to long-standing cultural pressures to have male children react in a social environment where reproductive choice is respected and sex selection technologies are openly marketed and available? To our knowledge, this report represents the first research investigating and documenting the experiences of son preference and sex selection among Indian women who have immigrated to the United States.

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[1] Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953611000700

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