Population Control and Sex-Selective Abortion in China and India : A Feminist Critique of Criminalisation

Summary, in English

This chapter outlines some of the key concerns with criminalising sex-selective abortion (SSA) in China and India, highlighting that it offers no identifiable options for sustainable, women-centred, progressive change. Instead, the criminalisation of SSA sits firmly within other forms of carceral feminism. Framing SSA as “female foeticide,” “femicide,” or “gendercide” is problematic, as such terms advance arguments for limiting women’s access to safe abortion through the indication and synonymisation of abortion with the notion of killing. Such a conflation of abortion and killing runs many risks in compromising the long struggles of feminist movements globally to defend access to safe abortion. While representing different ideological regimes, in both contexts, criminalising SSA has contributed to and bolstered the assertion of state power but without the feminist structural analysis of what generates son preference and daughter aversion.

• Author: Navtej Purewal; Lisa Eklund
• Editor: Myrna Dawson; Saide Mobayed Vega
• Department/s: Sociology; Centre for Economic Demography; Department of Sociology
• Publishing year: 2023
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: The Routledge International Handbook of Femicide and Feminicide
• Document type: Book chapter
• Publisher: Routledge
• Topic: Gender Studies; Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISBN: 9781003202332