May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (21 page)

It didn’t surprise me that Bombay had become, by the mid-1980s, the center of two new medical techniques used by the city’s business class to avoid the birth of unwanted daughters. Both procedures were commonly referred to as the sex test; in the United States they would be recognized as either amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling, two prenatal tests developed for the detection of genetic abnormalities in a fetus. In the Bombay of the mid-1980s, however, the tests were most often used to determine only the gender of an unborn child. Most people did not even know that the tests could diagnose birth defects.

In India, between the years 1978 and 1982, estimates put the number of abortions of female fetuses after the “sex test” at 78,000. That, at least, was the figure presented at a 1986 government hearing on the subject and widely quoted in the press. I was never able to determine how the figure was calculated or its original source, and it seemed to me another Indian statistic that could never be verified. Undeniable, however, was the fact that the majority of Bombay’s private gynecologists (84 percent of those surveyed, according to one apparently reliable
government study) conducted the test solely to determine the sex of a child. Even those doctors with misgivings said they performed the test because it was the wish of their patients. This led to all kinds of philosophical arguments to justify the practice, usually couched in such lofty concepts as “the will of the people” and “freedom.” “Democracy should permit one to have a child that one wants,” said Shirish Sheth, who was the incoming president of the Bombay Obstetrics and Gynecological Society. Sharad Gogate, a gynecologist with a busy middle-class practice, told me that “once a woman finds out it is female, in 80 percent of the cases she is hell-bent on an abortion.” He estimated that he had aborted one thousand female fetuses. I gave him a look of alarm. “Yes,” he said. “I have to accept that.”

I always linked the “sex test” and Belukkurichi’s female infanticide in my mind, and my pursuit of both subjects overlapped. I first went to Belukkurichi in January 1987 but arrived in the village already sick with stomach problems and had to turn back the next day. Four months later I went to Bombay to talk to women and doctors about the “sex test,” and only after that did I finally return to Belukkurichi for the week-long stay. There are of course fundamental differences between the two practices—the most obvious being the use of technology—but the root of the problem is the same. Although that does not mean that they are equally deplorable, I found myself torn. Infanticide is one of the most heinous of crimes, and yet, although I have always been pro-choice, I was more appalled by the abortions. Most of the educated, well-off women of Bombay were of course trying to avoid the astronomical cost of dowries in India, but among the rich, who could afford the cost of any number of weddings, a stronger motive seemed to be to avoid the social embarrassment of having daughters but no sons.

Bombay feminists in any case settled on the sex-determination tests as one of their most important causes. In May 1988, when the legislature of the state of Maharashtra, of which Bombay is a part, passed a law that banned the tests for the use of sex determination, they claimed their biggest victory—raising all sorts of questions in my mind about how one controls the practice without infringing on a woman’s right to abortion. The cause had been led by the Women’s Centre, the leading feminist group in Bombay, which in 1982 had brought out its first report on the use of amniocentesis for sex determination. Although feminists in other Indian cities sometimes dismissed prenatal sex determination as an elitist problem confined to Bombay’s business class,
the Women’s Centre countered that the tests were common in other areas as well, most notably in Punjab, India’s breadbasket. In fact, Punjab’s rich farmland and Maharashtra’s industry made the states the two most prosperous in India, and it was a depressing irony that the “sex test” proliferated amid such plenty. Prosperity, as in the case of the sati in Rajasthan, had not eliminated old customs but seemed to be promoting them in alarming new ways. If nothing else, the sex-determination tests were a powerful example of what can happen when modern technology collides with the forces of a traditional society.

Feminists also warned that the tests were seeping down to the middle class and the poor. Although private Bombay doctors charged as much as $125 for the test, clinics had sprung up in working-class areas and slums that offered amniocentesis at cut-rate prices and played on the fear of dowry with such slogans as “Better 500 rupees now than 500,000 later.” As far back as 1977, Bombay’s Hurkisondas Hospital, a private institution catering to the middle and working classes, began offering amniocentesis at one of the cheapest rates ever, eight dollars, in its new Prenatal Sex-Determination Clinic. “This is the only institution in our country which is carrying out this humane and beneficial test with such a high accuracy of the results,” the clinic’s information sheet said. In the years 1978 to 1982, a study of the hospital by a Bombay women’s organization found that of 8,000 women who came from all over India for the test, 7,999 wanted a son.

One muggy April morning in 1987, a year before the state legislature banned the tests, I found Assumpta D’Sylva, a thirty-one-year-old Bombay housewife, quietly waiting outside a Hurkisondas Hospital examination room for her “sex test,” in this case a chorionic villus sampling. For CVS, as it is called, doctors use a catheter to extract a few milligrams of placenta tissue, which is then analyzed for any genetic defects. In amniocentesis, doctors extract cells from the amniotic fluid by inserting a catheter into the sac surrounding the fetus. Amniocentesis is normally performed from the sixteenth to seventeenth week of pregnancy, CVS around the tenth. Both procedures invariably disclose the sex of the unborn child. CVS, though considered less accurate than amniocentesis, has the advantage of predicting a child’s sex at a much earlier date and thus eliminating the need for a difficult second-trimester abortion.

Assumpta D’Sylva already had two daughters, and if the child she was carrying turned out to be female, she would have an abortion. Her husband, Osbert D’Sylva, ran a family business, installing industrial
boilers, that he said was worth $400,000. Assumpta D’Sylva said it wasn’t that she and her husband couldn’t afford another girl, and it wasn’t that they didn’t love their daughters. She even insisted that her husband was “not so keen” on her decision to have the test because “another girl wouldn’t make any difference to him.” The decision, she said, was hers alone. She simply wanted a boy.

Assumpta D’Sylva was in fact the woman who had first described to me the standard exchange that a mother without sons often heard from her friends. “Our society makes you feel so bad if you don’t have a son,” she told me before the doctor called her in. “Especially when I go out for parties, people say, ‘How many children?’ and I say, ‘Two girls,’ and they say, ‘Oh, too bad, no boy.’ And I feel very bad.” She was well dressed and not shy about talking to me. From her point of view, she was doing what was best. She felt she was to blame, after all, for producing two daughters. When I reminded her that it is the man who determines the sex of a child, she said yes, she knew that, but “I still feel sometimes that it’s my fault. I just feel a lady has the capacity for carrying a boy.” Her parents and gynecologist were against the abortion she might have; her husband, she insisted, remained “neutral,” although he seemed to me to be in complete agreement with her decision. He listened quietly as she spoke. “We do feel bad about it,” he said, when I asked if he did, “but things have to go this way. You do feel looked down upon if you have two or three girls.” Amazingly, she and her husband were Roman Catholics. “Being a Catholic, it’s the only sin I commit,” Assumpta D’Sylva said. “When this test is here and everybody is doing it, why shouldn’t we have what we want?” Her tone was apologetic but casual. I could only think that her pregnancy was still so recent that it was not quite real to her, and that the technology had somehow sanitized the decision she had made. As I had with other women in India, I tried to put myself in her place and summon up the feelings that her society had forced upon her. But our worlds were too different, and her thinking was unfathomable to me.

In any case, “Why shouldn’t I have what I want?” was the refrain I heard all week at doctors’ offices in Bombay’s pockets of affluence. Nowhere was this attitude more in evidence than at the clinic of Rustom Soonawala, a gynecologist for women from Bombay’s leading business families. His patients also included some of India’s top actresses, as well as Americans, Europeans and Saudis. His waiting room was like no other doctor’s office I had seen in India: a marble
floor, leather banquettes, recessed lighting, tennis magazines on the coffee table. It was a Sunday afternoon, and yet there were several pregnant women in his waiting room. One had arrived in a red Standard sports car, which was selling in India for $20,000. After a short wait, I was ushered in to see the doctor himself, a handsome and elegant middle-aged man whom I could easily imagine on one of those marble terraces overlooking the sea. He was a member of the country’s most exclusive religious minority, a Parsi, one of the 90,000 people in India who worshiped the god Zoroaster. Dr. Soonawala seemed almost British in manner and outlook. He gave me a soft drink in a glass engraved with his initials, and he listened carefully to my first question about his use of amniocentesis. He thought for a moment, then began very slowly.

“Until the attitude of the whole Asian community changes, where a male issue in the family is a must,” he said, “we as scientists can help out the poor mother who year after year produces a baby until a boy is born.” Dr. Soonawala said he performed “fifty to seventy” sex-determination tests per year, using either amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. Of those, he aborted about “twenty to thirty” female fetuses, simply because they were female.

“I’m not very happy about it,” he said. “But you have to think that the child is not wanted.” The desire for male children, he explained, was stronger among the business community—the very people who could afford to have girls. “I wouldn’t completely blame them,” Dr. Soonawala added, “because if they’ve established a business, they need somebody to carry on the business after them.” I asked why a father could not turn a family business over to his daughter. That was not an option, Dr. Soonawala said, because the daughter must be given away in marriage to another family. He then offered another reason for the necessity of sons: “Amongst the Hindu community,” he said, “the funeral pyre has to be lit by a male.” I thought about asking why a daughter could not light the pyre but decided that questioning thousands of years of Hindu tradition would be of no use. “It’s a very peculiar situation,” Dr. Soonawala admitted. “If you don’t do it, you are creating an unhappy situation for the mother and child. And if you do it, you are discriminating on the basis of sex.”

That morning I had gone to a regular meeting of the Bombay branch of the Indian Medical Association because I had heard that the discussion for the day was going to be whether there should be “sex determination for the termination of pregnancy.” The prevailing opinion
among the thirty or so doctors appeared to be yes, with reservations. It was hard not be cynical; for many doctors in Bombay, the sex-determination tests were a lucrative part of their business. About halfway through the meeting, a young woman came to the front of the room and introduced herself as Jayshree Patel, a gynecologist. She began by asking her colleagues to think about why sex-selective abortion had become so popular in India. I settled in for an emotional speech opposing the sex test but was soon startled to hear Dr. Patel sum up by saying she was in fact in favor of sex-selective abortion. “It is the lesser of two evils,” she said. “The worse of the two evils is the state that a woman is going to face until the day she dies.”

The meeting continued with a presentation by Dr. Gogate, the obstetrician and gynecologist who later told me he had aborted one thousand female fetuses. Dr. Gogate spoke on the technical aspects of amniocentesis, concluding that the test should be used, but “judiciously,” whatever that meant. After the presentation, I introduced myself to Dr. Gogate, and he invited me to come to his office to see a chorionic villus sampling he was performing the next morning. I was there at eight, in time to see a thirty-six-year-old mother of three daughters laid out on an examination table. She was eight weeks pregnant with a fourth child. She could afford another girl, she later explained to me, but then repeated what I had heard so often. “In India,” she said, “every parent must have one son.”

The room where the test was to be performed was hot, run-down and sour-smelling. Nurses and technicians crowded around the woman and made last-minute adjustments in the medical equipment. Someone gave me a surgical mask and asked me to take off my shoes. I found a spot behind the bustle, where I stood, feeling out of place and queasy from the strange odors and heat. Dr. Gogate inserted a thin wire tube up into the woman’s uterus in order to suck a few milligrams of placenta tissue, which would then be transferred for analysis to a petri dish. As I watched the wire’s journey on the screen of the ultrasound machine, I slowly became disgusted. It had been building all week, but I think seeing this woman with her legs spread on the examination table, so exposed and, in a sense, so violated by the forces of her society, caused something to snap in me. What right did India have, I thought, to take the newest technology from the West and use it for something as reprehensible as the slaughter of female babies?

“Slaughter” is an explosive word, and it was something of a dilemma to find myself suddenly thinking of the abortion of a female
fetus as “slaughter” when I had for years believed in a woman’s right to end her pregnancy. If I thought of the abortion of a female fetus as “slaughter,” then what was I to call the abortion of a male fetus? Was it intellectually consistent to be in favor of a woman’s right to abortion yet opposed to sex-selective abortion? I honestly did not know what I thought. For the rest of my time in India, I made a small career out of posing the question, whenever the topic came up, to feminists, doctors, lawyers and friends. It would often provoke heated arguments, and there seemed no way out of the moral dilemma.