May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (22 page)

It annoyed me that although the feminists were doing the right thing in opposing sex-selective abortion, they were so unaware of the philosophical traps. They tended to be more emotional than rational in their arguments, and the paradox was that some of their rhetoric could easily have been borrowed by right-to-life groups in the United States. Some Indian feminists routinely referred to sex-selective abortion as “female feticide,” which made me wonder why they were not opposed to “male feticide” as well. Reports by the Women’s Centre included incendiary phrases such as “large-scale killing of the female fetus.” One 1986 magazine article about sex-determination tests they distributed from their files was entitled “The Silent Scream,” which also happened to be the title of the 1985 pro-life propaganda film in the United States claiming to show a twelve-week-old fetus writhing in pain as it was surgically aborted. The feminists argued that sex-selective abortion was illegal because it violated Articles 14 and 15 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantee no discrimination against women. They also argued that the unborn female fetus had “the right” to be born. (Indian courts have not ruled in general on whether a fetus has rights, although the law does recognize certain inheritance rights in favor of an unborn child.) Whatever the case, if the female fetus had “the right” to be born, should not the male fetus have the same?

What I eventually concluded was that the feminists’ sloganeering was aimed more at emotional effect than at logical persuasion, and that it reflected the differences in the issue of abortion in India and the United States. Bombay feminists could freely make outrageous statements that seemed to threaten a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy because the right to abortion was not under siege in India as it was in the United States. Interestingly, India had never engaged in the debate over when life begins, perhaps because the Hindu classical texts had expressed three views on the subject: life begins at conception; life
begins with the first movement of the fetus; and life begins with the first breath of the baby after delivery.

Abortion in India was illegal in most cases until 1971, but in August of that year the law was liberalized after only two hours of tepid debate at the end of the monsoon session of Parliament. This was a year and a half before the U.S. Supreme Court in
Roe v. Wade
legalized abortion in America. Although I found in my research that it was never stated as such on the floor of the Indian Parliament, the reason for the easy passage of the Indian abortion law was widely acknowledged to be the government’s desperate desire for another method of family planning in a country whose population was expected to reach one billion by the year 2000, with the result that India would eventually surpass China as the most populous nation on earth. The current Indian law in fact permits abortion only under certain conditions, but these are so broadly interpreted as to make abortion available on demand before the twentieth week of pregnancy. (For example, as the law is written, an Indian woman may have a legal abortion if she says that her method of contraception has failed.)

Since then, Indian feminists have generally supported a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion but have criticized what they believe is the government’s callous view of abortion as a tool of the state in carrying out population control. Abortion in India has become a symbol—rightly—for the neglect of women’s health. For example, the Women’s Centre says that 90 percent of abortions in India are performed by unqualified doctors, and that on average there are 68 deaths for every 1,000 abortions performed in India. This is a much higher death rate from abortion than in other poor countries, but my instincts told me it was not an exaggeration. (In the United States in 1987, there were a reported 4 deaths following the 1,588,000 abortions performed.) “A woman’s health isn’t taken into consideration,” said Vibhuti Patel, one of the leaders of the Women’s Centre. “Our major issue is safe abortion.” The same feminists also opposed the mass use of the birth-control pill, criticizing it as another example of the government’s desire to control women regardless of health. Feminists complained that village women were commonly given oral contraceptives without adequate examinations or follow-ups, and were largely unaware of the pill’s side effects. Many feminists were also opposed to the methods of the government’s population-control program in general, arguing that the program was motivated solely by the desire to bring down the birth rate and not by any desire to better women’s lives.

As I spoke to the feminists, I began to wonder if sex-selective abortion had ever been debated in the United States, where the ethical issues raised by advances in technology—such as genetic engineering—are more fully developed. I had noticed some references to American essays on the subject in the library of a medical research foundation during my trip to Bombay, and when I returned to Delhi I wrote a friend in Washington and asked her to try to locate the material for me. What she sent was fascinating: In the late seventies in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, in what was apparently one of the first explorations of the subject, a research group of the Hastings Center, a think tank for biomedical ethics in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., concluded that amniocentesis for sex choice should be discouraged. But in a subsequent article in the same journal, John C. Fletcher, a specialist in bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and a codirector of the Hastings Center research group, changed his mind, apparently because of the same moral dilemmas I was experiencing. He argued that although “sex choice was not a compelling reason for abortion,” it was nonetheless “inconsistent to support an abortion law that protects the absolute right of women to decide and, at the same time, to block access to information about the fetus because one thinks that an abortion may be foolishly sought on the basis of the information.” It was a persuasive point of view, but one that is easier to hold in the United States than in a culture where tens of thousands of fetuses are aborted simply because they are female. After I returned from India,
The New York Times
discovered the issue in a front-page story on Christmas Day, 1988. Under the headline
FETAL SEX TEST USED AS STEP TO ABORTION
, Gina Kolata reported that in the United States, “many doctors are providing prenatal diagnosis to pregnant women who want to abort a fetus on the basis of sex alone.” The story at first seemed to suggest that sex-selective abortion was taking root in America but later explained that the practice was chiefly confined to women from India and other parts of Asia who had settled in the United States and who were “most likely to ask openly for sex selection.” If so, how could the United States stop the practice without infringing on abortion rights, as well as rights to certain medical procedures?

Ultimately, I decided that the question of whether it was intellectually consistent to be in favor of a woman’s right to abortion yet opposed to sex-selective abortion had, for me, a different answer in the United States than in India. I can’t resolve the contradictions and can only conclude that there are no universally applicable answers in this world. In the United States, although the principle of
Roe v. Wade
is
under attack, abortion is still generally available until the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy; in effect, a woman does not have to give her doctor a reason for her decision. Although the idea of terminating a pregnancy simply because the fetus is female is morally repugnant to me, I believe that outlawing such a practice would fundamentally infringe on a woman’s right to choose.

In India, I felt, the situation was different. The Indian abortion law, although broadly interpreted, did not, as it was written, give a woman an unconditional right to abortion. An Indian woman was permitted to have an abortion only under certain conditions, usually if her doctor determined that her pregnancy would cause “grave injury” to her “physical or mental health.” Pregnancy as a result of rape was presumed to constitute grave injury to a woman’s physical or mental health, as was a failure of contraception—the most frequently stated reason for abortion in India.

More important, I think the shocking number of aborted female fetuses in India constituted so serious a problem that the state had an obligation to step in and protect its interests, as the legislature of Maharashtra had done in banning sex-determination tests. The language
of Roe v. Wade
may help explain what I mean. In the majority opinion, Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote that although an abortion should be considered part of a woman’s right to privacy, that right was not absolute, and at the third trimester, when the fetus had the potential to live outside the mother’s womb, “the state interests as to protection of health, medical standards, and prenatal life become dominant.” Laws are not made in a social vacuum but reflect the societies they govern, and in India, I think, the rights of the state became dominant when prenatal tests developed for the detection of genetic abnormalities in an unborn fetus began to be so widely and grotesquely abused.

Not all Indian feminists agreed with this point of view. Some argued, as I had in the beginning, that any law to ban sex-determination tests infringed on a woman’s freedom of choice.
“1
would not be surprised if some women do challenge the law on the grounds that they have a right to abort a female fetus,” Indira Jaising, one of Bombay’s leading lawyers, told me before the Maharashtra law was actually passed. Others thought India’s population problem was the more important issue and saw an aborted female fetus as at least one less child. A few even argued, like the woman obstetrician I had heard speak at the meeting of the Bombay branch of the Indian Medical Association,
that it would be more humane to abort a female fetus than to allow the child to enter a world full of such hardship for women.

Ultimately, the feminists sidestepped the abortion-rights issue by pushing for a ban on the “sex test” and not a regulation of abortion itself, even though the ban did, in effect, limit a woman’s abortion right. But most feminists eventually came around to this approach. As it was written, the Maharashtra law permitted a prenatal test only if a woman was at least thirty-five years old, or had a medical or family history suggesting the possibility of a baby with birth defects. The law prescribed prison sentences for both doctors and patients, but only if a panel of health professionals or other “appropriate authority” found the test to be a violation of the law—which, feminists admitted, made the ban virtually impossible to enforce. “So many people congratulated us, but it was a limited victory and the task now is very complex,” said Vibhuti Patel of the Women’s Centre. She was hopeful, however, that the law would at least have a deterrent effect. “It has taken away the respectability of the test,” she said. “There won’t be any more advertisements on trains.” Although a number of doctors complained that an unenforceable law was not the best path toward reform, D. T. Joseph, the state health secretary, insisted it was an important first step. “Laws don’t necessarily change society,” he said, “but why can’t a law occasionally lead the way?” He estimated that the ban had stopped 85 percent of Bombay doctors from performing sex-determination tests, and that the rest had gone underground. He also expected thousands of women to travel to other states where the practice was still legal. But by the time I left India, the Maharashtra precedent was increasingly seen as a qualified success, and a nationwide ban was under consideration in Delhi.

I was in Bombay again a few months after the ban was enacted, and so I stopped by to see how Dr. Soonawala’s upmarket practice had been affected by the new law. Dr. Soonawala was as polite as ever, although more direct than before. “I would love to do the test,” he said. “But at this stage, when it’s all too hot, I don’t want to put my foot in a mess.” Dr. Soonawala told me his office turned down three to four requests a week for the test, and he assumed the women then turned to doctors who were willing to perform it illegally.

Dr. Soonawala found the situation unsafe and unfair, even though he insisted that he personally was not comfortable aborting a fetus on the basis of sex. “Emotionally, I don’t accept it,” he said. “No one emotionally accepts a war. But still there are wars where people
slaughter each other. So it’s sort of a similar situation. There are so many instances when we read in the newspapers of infanticide, but I think it is much more cruel to sacrifice a child after it is born than at a stage where there is hardly any format. Abortion
has
been accepted in this country.”

DR. SOONAWALA WAS RIGHT. OF COURSE IT WAS INFINITELY MORE CRUEL
to murder a day-old infant than to abort a ten-week-old fetus. But having been to Belukkurichi and met the four couples who had murdered their daughters, I found myself judging the situation a little differently. Those couples could afford neither dowry nor abortion, and they had no access to any prenatal tests. Although killing a baby because she was a girl could never be considered another version of aborting a fetus because it was female, the uneducated people of the valleys around Belukkurichi were doing what they felt they had to do, and what they saw as their right. Mariaye, the woman who had allowed her mother-in-law to kill her daughter, put it bluntly. “Abortion at the fourth month is legally accepted in India,” she said. “Instead of killing the child in the womb, I killed the child when it was born. If that is accepted, why can’t I do this?”