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Aswad -> RE: Eradicating women. (8/23/2007 6:06:24 PM)
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Greetings, everyone.
My gut reaction to this was "damn, that's horrible."
That always bears examination, and here's my quick take on the various issues in this thread.
First, we have the question of whether there is anything wrong with the practice, along with what is wrong, and why it is wrong. This one is rather popular, because it's really very simple, a matter of opinion, and the popular opinion is so uniform that one doesn't face any significant complaints for voicing it. Even I dislike the practice, so let's examine what and why. Well, on the surface, at least, it's just a bunch of people killing unborn baby girls because that happens to be an established tradition where they live, and it is a thing that happens on a large scale, hence words like gendercide spring to mind, even if they are more than a little premature.
Either way, the surface issue is simple enough.
But despite the gut reaction, it's not like India has a state-sponsored and state-enforced gendercide program going on here. This is no more the Holocaust than any other act of Othering with attendant deaths: the seperation between the out-group and the in-group or "moral core". In this case, the out-group is female foetuses. Having established that this doesn't happen at the state level, we could examine the cultural level, but we know what we would find there, and we also know that a number of participants in the thread reject the validity of that level of analysis.
A brief quote from Malavika Karlekar on this, borrowed from Gendercide Watch:
quote:
... those women who undergo sex determination tests and abort on knowing that the foetus is female are actively taking a decision against equality and the right to life for girls. In many cases, of course, the women are not independent agents but merely victims of a dominant family ideology based on preference for male children ...
The last part of this clearly asserts that it is a cultural element, which adds validity to what I will address later in the post. But let's confine this point to the first part of the quote, which assigns the blame to the women who opt to have these abortions. The quotes that support that are a Google away if anyone wants to check the validity of assigning the blame thus, and I would add that it appears to be overwhelmingly thus, also in the cases where we're dealing with infanticide, rather than the Indian problem (sex-selective abortion).
So, let's look at it from that angle, at the level where the choice is made.
The women who do this view their female offspring as liabilities, and choose not to deal with that liability, or (as some of them put it) not to inflict that liability on their families. It seems horrid to us, but circumstances make it a fact for them that these offspring really are liabilities. In the case of India, this comes down to families not wanting to spend 10 years' income on their female child while their standard of living would keep rising if they had a male child instead, thanks to various reasons tied to the culture and its patriarchal legacy.
So, are these women doing something wrong, and- if so- what, and why is it wrong?
This particular issue comes down to what the valid reasons for an abortion might be, if any. As Susan has pointed out, that will not be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Let's just do a bit of comparison, then, as I've offered my opinion on that elsewhere. We on CM for the most part live in the western hemisphere, where the pro-choice position is the prevailing legal norm. Statistics from the US, borrowed from WP, indicates that 46% of those who have elective abortions were not using contraception at the time they became pregnant, and that of those who did, only 51% (condom) to 76% (pill) used it in the manner that affords reliable contraception.
In any case, one of the most commonly cited reasons to have an elective abortion is liability.
This liability comes down to- going by questionnaires among those undergoing elective abortions- not wanting to raise the child at that time (time cost), not wanting to suffer financial losses through interrupted work or education, concerns about relationship stability and maturity as a parent, and also the inherent costs of having a child. Really, the only difference here is that there are differences in what liabilities exist in the Indian culture, as opposed to the western cultures. And, most importantly, that the liability is different between female and male offspring as a cultural artifact. In short, the women in India are thinking and acting like western women do, but in different circumstances.
I cannot fault the women who do this without faulting western women, much as I'd like to.
In my view, meatcleaver made many good points about just that, missed by most here.
Second, we have the issue of their culture. Is it wrong for their culture to be stacked so that it causes female offspring to be a greater liability than male offspring? If so, what is wrong with their culture, and why? In my opinion, that deserves a seperate thread all of its own, because it is a very complicated issue to define and debate. No culture has any objective claim to right and wrong- or superiority and inferiority- and no culture is quite perfect, even by their own standards. Injustices happen, regardless of whether they are happening to men, women, gays, lesbians, white people, black people, Jews, atheists, Muslims, poor people, disabled ones, or people who happen to like BDSM.
Every culture is guilty of Othering, and every culture is guilty of not caring for the Others.
Third, we have the matter of what to do, if anything, and why.
I cannot support depriving these women of the choice of elective abortion without also supporting the same position with regard to western women. To interfere with their right to that choice, I would have to campaign against the right to voluntary abortion in the west as well, as I subscribe to cleaning up my own act before that of others, as well as I can.
I cannot support forcing a cultural change on India without also supporting forcing a cultural change on every human on this Earth, because they are all guilty of equally large sins and hypocrisies in my view. Raping a culture does no good. It does not bring any understanding or appreciation for a change. Change must come from within.
Apart from that, my isolationist stance means I think it's wrong to intervene in another society's affairs in a direct way unless their actions are directly imparting members of other societies, though I think it is perfectly valid to lead by example or to help people out of a culture they don't want to be stuck in. Direct action usually means war, which I prefer to reserve for self-defense.
Addressing some loose odds and ends...
1. The idea of putting the kids up on eBay is better than infanticide and elective abortion.
2. Personal choice is not as simple as we think, and a movement can gain an inertia of its own.
3. Sometimes, a bad choice is the rational choice, such as with the Tragedy of the Commons.
4. What makes killing someone for "dishonoring" their family worse than any other death penalty?
5. The demographic impact of sex-selective abortion and infanticide is irrelevant, except when attempting to reduce the population (e.g. China). Adults do not have a right to a mate/spouse, and to assert otherwise is to sanction rape and kidnapping. The adults will die from old age, and things will stabilize, or the society itself will die. Procreation, sex and companionship are the issues, and these are not inalienable rights.
6. As Sinergy said, people will find a way. Herbal lore is full of abortifactants, and they were used as just that. Failing that, history shows us that people of all cultures will resort to infanticide. It's not down to governments to decide, unless they are extremely totalitarian and have Orwellian surveillance. They can choose to stand by and let it happen, or they can interfere and make things worse, or they can fuck things up for everyone else by limiting the choices available to those who didn't do anything wrong in the first place. At least the present situation in India leads to elective abortions, rather than outright infanticide, even if it's not a good situation overall. (I'm an optimist, the glass is half-full.)
7. In the end, my view on abortion comes down to my view on self-defense: if it's a necessity to kill in order to preserve your life, or the life of a loved one, people are going to do it, and law will not stop them. No reason to criminalize it, regardless of whether the one killed is an adult, a child, a baby or a foetus.
In short, this situation sucks, but I don't know a good way to resolve it.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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