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PREFACE

A few years ago an Indian American undergraduate student at the University of Chicago asked me to moderate a film discussion about a documentary on sex-selective abortion in India and China. The screening of the film, It’s a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words, was sponsored by a well-regarded human rights center on campus. Before I agreed to host the film discussion, I wanted to know a little bit about the movie. Through an online search I learned that many women’s groups, including the National Organization for Women, were screening the film across the country. The film was also an official selection for the Amnesty International Film Festival, and it appeared in Ms. review of feminist movies. Given the support it had from feminist organizations, I agreed to moderate the discussion even though my initial Google search did not reveal any background about the people and organizations that made the movie.

However, when I watched the movie, I was troubled by the narrow story it told about sex selection in India. The movie began with a poor Indian woman from a village pointing to where she buried the infant girls she had killed; it depicted the violent removal of a fetus from the womb as part of a cycle of violence against Indian women; and it ended with an interview with a Caucasian American woman activist who said that she helps women in other countries because they cannot help themselves.

The characters in this film were exactly the offensive caricatures identified by human rights scholar Makau Mutua nearly two decades ago in his critique of human rights work.¹ In this movie, Indians were savages, female fetuses were victims, and Caucasian American women were saviors. Nonetheless, much like the feminists who lauded the movie across the United States, the largely pro-choice audience for whom I moderated the film discussion did not challenge the film or its message.

Through a series of interviews with policymakers, advocates, and women who sex-select, the film framed sex-selective abortion as a cycle of violence against girls and women in India. Having spent many summers in India with my grandparents, through the academic and activist work I have done in India over the last decade, and having lived there as a Fulbright scholar, I know firsthand that many women obtain sex-selective abortions because of societal norms that demand a male heir, and not as a result of overt physical or emotional coercion. There is no doubt that some of these women also face domestic violence for their failure to produce a male heir. The film, however, depicted no possibility other than violence.

Upset by the disconnect between my discomfort with the film and the general acceptance of its message by the people with whom I watched it, that very evening I stayed up late into the night trying to find out information about the filmmakers and the film’s funding sources. The film was expensive to make as it was shot on location in India and China. But unlike other films with such generous funding, the film credits did not list any funding sources. I thought I was at a dead end when I made it to the final page of the Google search results and uncovered nothing.

As a last resort I traced the ownership of the domain name of the website for the movie. By doing this, I found that the director of the film worked for an organization that makes gruesome anti-abortion videos. On the website that promotes the film, he is described only as a filmmaker who makes movies on human rights issues—there is no mention of any of his prior works. The director later admitted to me in an interview that some of his funding came from people whom he had met through that anti-abortion organization.² Had the director’s background and funding sources not been so cleverly hidden, then perhaps the American feminist community would have been more skeptical of the story he was telling about India and China.

In May 2013, I published an article in Slate about my discovery.³ Shivana Jorawar, Reproductive Justice Director at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) at the time, read my article and told me that the promoters of It’s a Girl asked her organization to co-sponser a screening of the film on Capitol Hill for congressional representatives in Washington, D.C. This was all happening at the same time that a bill was pending in the U.S. House of Representatives to ban sex-selective abortion in the United States.⁴ The bill’s preamble states that its purpose is to stop the widespread practice of abortions of female fetuses by Indian and Chinese people living in the United States. Bills like this were also sweeping across state legislatures. By 2016, half of all state legislatures in the United States had voted on bans on sex-selective abortions, purportedly to address the behavior of Asian Americans. Seven states enacted the bans during this wave of legislative activity. Two states had adopted them decades ago.

Americans went to India and China, made a film depicting the “culture” of “son preference” and violence against women, and brought it back to the United States to support claims that Asian Americans sex-select and to lobby for laws that burden the reproductive rights of all American women. The rub of it is that they are convincing pro-choice feminists that the ban promotes women’s equality.

Moreover, anti-abortion legislators and movement actors deceptively used advocates concerned about women’s equality in other countries to further restrictions on reproductive rights. For example, Sabu George, a well-known activist against sex selection in India, was invited to testify and did testify at a hearing organized by Representative Chris Smith, a staunch opponent of legal abortion rights, for the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. The purpose of the hearing was to push the U.S. government to stop funding family planning services in India because of sex selection.⁵

The legislative discussions about sex-selective abortion uniformly contend that the bans address a widespread practice among Asian Americans.⁶ As someone whose scholarship and clinical work involve India and who has a personal connection to both the United States and India, I was skeptical of both the film and the empirical claims made by the proponents of the sex-selective abortion bills. Many of the factors that motivated my aunt who lives in India to abort a female fetus after she had already given birth to two girls did not exist for my other aunt who lived in the United States. As someone who was raised by Indian immigrants in the United States, I was aware that the “culture” of immigrant communities evolves from the “culture” in the places from which they migrated.

I teamed up with movement leaders to study the issue further. An important voice for Asian American and Pacific Islander women, the National Asian Pacific Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), under Miriam Yeung’s direction was working to defeat the bans. I also worked with Sujatha Jesudason who is an expert in the field. Under the auspices of the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, which I directed at the time, we investigated the issue from empirical, comparative, legal, and medical perspectives. As part of our team were economists Arindam Nandi and Alexander Persaud; law students Kelsey Stricker and Jeff Gilson; and Brian Citro, a fellow in the clinic; as well as health experts at ANSIRH (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health), a reproductive health organization based at the University of California–San Francisco. Economists on our team analyzed U.S. demographic data from 2008 to 2012 from the American Community Survey and found that in some cases, Asian Americans had a girl preference. When some Asian Americans had two prior boys, they were more likely to have girls than were Caucasian Americans. These findings, together with the contextualized and comparative perspective presented in this book, suggest that a few Asian Americans may use some method of sex selection (not necessarily abortion) to obtain a family with gender balance. That is a family that has at least one boy and at least one girl.

We released a report in June 2014 documenting the empirical findings and disproving other misrepresentations made by supporters of sex-selective abortion bans in the United States.⁷ Since the report was released, no bill banning sex-selective abortion has been adopted by any state except Indiana. However, a federal judge in Indiana has blocked the enforcement of the Indiana law.⁸ This book builds on my collaborative as well as my own individual work on sex selection.⁹