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Daniel Goodkind Sex-Selective Abortion, Reproductive Rights, And Daniel Goodkind Sex-Selective Abortion, Reproductive Rights, and the Greater Locus of Gender Discrimination in Family Formation: Cairos Unresolved Questions No. 97-383 PSC Research Report Series March 1997 The Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan is one of the oldest population centers in the United States. Established in 1961 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Center has a rich history as the main workplace for an interdisciplinary community of scholars in the field of population studies. Today the Center is supported by a Population Research Center Core Grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) as well as by the University of Michigan, the National Institute on Aging, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. PSC Research Reports are prepublication working papers that report on current demographic research conducted by PSC associates and affiliates. The papers are written by the researcher(s) for timely dissemination of their findings and are often later submitted for publication in scholarly journals. The PSC Research Report Series was begun in 1981 and is organized chronologically. Copyrights are held by the authors. Readers may freely quote from, copy, and distribute this work as long as the copyright holder and PSC are properly acknowledged and the original work is not altered. PSC Publications Population Studies Center, University of Michigan http://www.psc.lsa.umich.edu/pubs/ 1225 S. University, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2590 USA Sex-Selective Abortion, Reproductive Rights, and the Greater Locus of Gender Discrimination in Family Formation: Cairos Unresolved Questions Abstract: Prenatal sex testing followed by sex-selective abortion represents a blatant form of discrimination. Hence, it has been widely condemned by international observers as being harmful and unethical. At the same time, to restrict access to prenatal sex testing would appear to contradict the broader agenda of the recent Cairo conference on population and development, which shifted developmental priorities in favor of maternal empowerment and reproductive rights. This article explicates five related questions that remain unresolved in Cairos wake: 1) whether sex-selective abortion stems from culture (classically defined) or context, 2) whether sex-selective abortion will decrease following a decline in discriminatory attitudes, 3) whether sex-selective abortion substitutes for postnatal discrimination, 4) whether condemnations of prenatal sex selection can be reconciled with other policy agendas related to abortion rights, and 5) whether future demographic imbalances in the sex ratio of adults is cause for concern. The pivotal theme linking these unresolved questions is whether concerns about prenatal sex selection can and should be separated from concerns about abortion, more generally, and other forms of parental discrimination against young daughters. Our collective insights into these thorny issues have heretofore failed us, due to both powerful political forces and the limited comparative design of recent research on gender discrimination across the early stages of the life course. Dataset used: Various secondary data. Author s Address Daniel Goodkind is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Population Studies Center, 1225 South University Avenue, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Fax 313.998.7415. Tel 313.998.6407. E-mail goodkind @psc.lsa.umich.edu. Acknowledgments This manuscript has benefitted from the authors helpful discussions with Pam Smock, Cameron Campbell, and Ronald Freedman. The author is solely responsible for its contents. INTRODUCTION Major advances in prenatal sex testing technologies since the 1970s have given parents the option of aborting a fetus of an unwanted sex (Bennett, 1983; Brambati, 1992; Hong, 1994). The earliest discussions of such practices focused on their causes and potential consequences in the industrialized West, where such technologies first became available (e.g., Etzioni, 1968; Westoff and Rindfuss, 1974; Fletcher, 1979; Bennett, 1983). More recently, attention has shifted to East Asia and South Asia, where sex-selective abortion and its demographic consequences have become far more significant than they ever were in the West (e.g., Hull, 1990; Zeng et al., 1993; Coale and Banister, 1994; Gu and Roy, 1995; Park and Cho, 1995; Greenhalgh and Li, 1995; Goodkind, 1996). Because family sizes have declined rapidly in many developing areas without a corresponding elimination of son preferences, many parents still want to have at least one son in their smaller families. The predominance of female fetuses among sex-selected abortions has contributed to rising sex ratios at birth throughout much of Confucian Asia. Such ratios ordinarily total about 105-106 male per 100 female births, but they have recently breached 113 in Korea and China, 110 in Taiwan, and 107 among Chinese in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia (Park and Cho, 1995; Gu and Roy, 1995; Goodkind, 1996). The use of sex-selective abortion following prenatal sex testing has been condemned by a number of international observers. Sachar et al. (1990), for example, described such practices as a "moral outrage." More recently, in a summary of findings from an international conference on sex preferences for children in Asia, Gu and Roy (1995) repeatedly characterized sex- 1 selective abortion as a "problem." They and others noted that governments in Korea (Hong, 1994) and China (Greenhalgh and Li, 1995) have attempted to restrict access to such procedures and have called for penalties against doctors performing such procedures. Similar restrictions against prenatal sex testing have been attempted in parts of India (Roggencamp, 1985; Bumiller, 1990; Nandan, 1993; Parikh, 1993). In response to the increasing use of prenatal sex selection, the Programme of Action resulting from the 1994 United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo stated the following policy objectives: to eliminate all forms of discrimination against the girl child and the root causes of son preference, which results in harmful and unethical (italics mine) practices regarding female infanticide and prenatal sex selection;(UN Programme for Action, 1994; Article 4.15). This call to end all forms of discrimination against daughters is heartening and easy to applaud. What is more problematic is that this chorus of opposition to sex-selective abortion has coalesced without a careful articulation of why this particular practice should be condemned. Perhaps the moral justification for such condemnation is taken to be self evident, given that sex-selective abortion is so patently discriminatory. But it is the very obviousness of this discrimination that has precluded discussion of a related, but more complicated issue -- whether and how prenatal sex selection can be construed to be "harmful and unethical." Actually, that proposition has already been debated and sometimes challenged in a provocative and thoughtful literature that first blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s, well before sex ratios at birth began to rise in Asia. This debate drew in not only social demographers, but also feminist scholars, legal and ethical experts, and health specialists. Regrettably, however, this literature has gone largely unrecognized in the 1990s among population specialists, who have instead deflected attention toward fresh evidence of such discriminatory practices. The purpose of this paper is to review some of this undercited literature and thereby clarify a set of pivotal questions that remain either unasked, unanswered, or insufficiently understood. The five questions that this paper examines are as follows: 1) what motivates sex-selective abortion?; cultural vs. context, 2) would the elimination of son preferences result in the elimination of prenatal sex selection?, 3) is sex-selective abortion an adequate barometer of 2 discrimination against daughters if postnatal discrimination declines because of it?, 4) are condemnations of prenatal sex selection consistent with other social agendas regarding abortion rights, more generally?, and 5) will future relative shortages of adult women (due to the excess abortion of female fetuses) be detrimental to women's interests? The central interrogative theme linking these issues is whether or not condemnations of prenatal sex selection can or should be isolated from more general concerns about other forms of parental discrimination against young daughters, and even abortion itself. This theme constitutes a thorny conundrum for the agenda articulated at the Cairo population conference. That agenda shifted developmental priorities away from control over population growth, per se, and in favor of maternal empowerment and reproductive rights (McIntosh and Finkle, 1995). However, if abortion rights, sui generis, are to be included among the reproductive rights to be protected by public decree, it is unclear whether those rights can and should be withheld from parents who are concerned about fetal sex. This article explicates this conundrum and offers two general explanations for why it has escaped detection and discussion for so long. First, it has been obfuscated due to the limited comparative design of recent research on gender discrimination at the early stages of the life course. Second, under ordinary circumstances, most pro- choice proponents view the promotion of reproductive rights and gender equality as inseparable goals. However, in the case of sex selective abortion, these
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