Abstract
The advent of techniques of sex selection that rely on assisted reproduction led to a questioning of whether sex selection should be deemed always and everywhere unethical. While China and India are normally associated with condemned practices, they are also implicated in processes that constitute globally stratified sex selection inclusive of its more valued form, often referred to as family balancing. Through an application of Ong and Collier’s concept of global assemblage, I demonstrate how family balancing, which has taken on a “global form,” is tied to an “assemblage” of factors related to the anti-natal, population control contexts that have been pervasive in Asia. Three simultaneously occurring processes since the mid-1990s constituted stratified sex selection: the surfacing of China and India as figurative counter examples in deliberations of ethics on new techniques; active (inter)national surveillance of sex ratios as well as denunciation and criminalization of sex selective abortion in China and India; and the role of China and India in neoliberalizing population control and developing globalized markets in reproduction. Accounting for globally stratified sex selection requires a more robust interpretation of ethics that rethinks disciplinary approaches just as much as relativist ones in which respect for individual autonomy tends to overtake all other concerns.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank all the participants, especially the co-organizers, Anindita Majumdar, Paro Mishra, and Ravindra Kaur, of “Reproduction, demography and cultural anxieties in India and China in the 21st Century,” held at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India (20–21 February 2020). The symposium provided a generative space to think through reproduction in comparative national and global contexts.
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Bhatia, R. Figuring India and China in the Constitution of Globally Stratified Sex Selection. ABR 13, 23–37 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-020-00160-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-020-00160-0