Re-visioning evidence: Reflections on the recent controversy around gender selective abortion in the UK

ABSTRACT

Reports in the British media over the last 4 years have highlighted the schisms and contestations that have accompanied the reports of gender selective abortions amongst British Asian families. The position that sex-selection may be within the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act has particularly sparked controversy amongst abortion campaigners and politicians but equally among medical practitioners and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service who have hitherto tended to stay clear of such debates. In what ways has the controversy around gender-based abortion led to new framings of the entitlement to service provision and new ways of thinking about evidence in the context of reproductive rights? We reflect on these issues drawing on critiques of what constitutes best evidence, contested notions of reproductive rights and reproductive governance, comparative work in India and China as well as our involvement with different groups of campaigners including British South Asian NGOs. The aim of the paper is to situate the medical and legal provision of abortion services in Britain within current discursive practices around gender equality, ethnicity, reproductive autonomy, probable and plausible evidence, and policies of health reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender selection
• reproductive autonomy
• abortion legislation reform
• sex-ratio at birth
• plausible evidence
• Britain

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their feedback and the participants at the workshop on Re-situating Abortion organised by the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health at the University of Sussex in November 2014. Parts of the paper have been drawn from work supported by a Nuffield Foundation grant to Sylvie Dubuc.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Analyses of sex-ratio at birth can only evidence the occurrence of sex-selection within a population when directed systematically at a specific gender (e.g. selection against females to ensure a male offspring) but would not evidence sex-selection for ‘family balancing’ (e.g. to secure having a girl when only boy(s) are born and vice versa) because male and female specific selections would cancel each other at aggregated level, resulting in normal sex-ratio at birth.

2 On average, the likelihood of having a boy is slightly higher than the probability of having a girl (about 0.51 against 0.49); the worldwide unbiased SRB is around 105 boys per 100 girls at birth, although geographic variations exist (e.g. Jacobson, Møller, & Mouritsen, 1999).

3 Considered a robust indicator, the SRB has been extensively applied to evidence prenatal sex selection in countries like India and China for instance, where the practice of sex selective abortions is recognised and well documented.

4 This was differentiated from the more widely regarded local concept of reproductive rights (janani adhikar) understood as the ‘right to reproduce’ rather than the right to control one's own body. More broadly this view resonates with Petchesky's writing on the culturally problematic nature of the goal of reproductive autonomy and having control over one's own body (Petchesky & Judd, 1998; Unnithan, 2003).

5 South Korea is the only country to date, where a strong bias in the sex-ratio developed in the 1980s, has reverted and the causes behind this trend remain difficult to evaluate (Das Gupta, Chung, & Li, 2009). A policy combining enforcement of a ban against the use of sex-selection method, media campaigns to promote girls and some modifications of the law in favour of mothers, in addition to general economic changes and increasing paid work for women may have contributed to gender normative changes and attitudes to sex – selection. (e.g. Das Gupta et al., 2003, 2009)

6 The report also questioned whether the quantitative evidence showing SRB bias in the US among Asian communities would apply to more recent years. However this critique was not robustly qualified.

7 See their webpage and video on Stop Gendercide at www.stopgendercide.org/tag/jeena-international. There is less of a sense of the agentive actions related to abortion as discussed with reference to the Indian context described in the section above.