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apart from diagnostic techniques only able to determine this after 20 weeks, this is a disingenuous attempt at equivalence. sex selection isn’t about abortion- shocker!- it’s about gendered inequalities & the social conditions that (re) produce it. 1/13 https://twitter.com/bbcjaynemcc/status/1351863325517373441
The conflation of sex-selection with abortion is anti-abortion, is deeply politicised & with quite dangerous implications for abortion access. It derails & distracts from the political goals of reproductive justice. 2/13
Lessons from India might help. India’s anti-SSA laws are not about abortion (yet) but about the control/use/regulation of diagnostic techniques. The intense focus on it at the expense of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act has meant that providers & people conflate them 3/13
In my study in India, respondents (providers & women) thought abortion was illegal, referencing the anti-SSA imagery & rhetoric. Providers explained their fears of being prosecuted for SSA if they provided abortion. This has a chilling effect on access. 4/13
(Limited access can have dire consequences, as we well know) Govt efforts to address SSA w/o grappling with the broader issues- i.e. patriarchies!- are still forms of biopolitics, as Eklund & Purewal demonstrate ( https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353516682262) 5/13
SSA is an outcome of gendered, structural violence, of ‘broader systemic economic, political and social processes’ ( https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0122-y) 6/13
In its attempts to curb SSA, the state can restrict reproductive options as providers deny womxn's reproductive rights; legitimising providers' positions as the arbiter of a deserving abortion: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rhm.2015.06.003 7/13
Campaigns against SSA- even feminist ones- need to recognise the patriarchal underpinnings of SSA and seek to dismantle those w/o erasing womxn’s agencies. It needs a broader understanding of reproductive stigma itself. 8/13
In Europe and North America, the moral panic around SSA is tied to racist and deeply problematic frames of minoritised womxn. Some excellent work by Ellie Lee analysing media coverage & parliamentary debates in GB: https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353516678010 9/13
The wonderful @kasstanb & Maya Unnithan conceptualise how providers “arbitrate” SSA requests, framing it as a legitimate care service to meet diver reproductive health needs of women: https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2019.1709183 10/13
. @fran_amery brilliantly demonstrates how the UK’s debates on SSA, despite language of intersectionality, “others” Indian migrants; framing them as threats to “British” values: https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2015.1089027 11/13
Part of the issue is the really limiting notion of “choice” (and who has access to them), the insidious ways in which abortion stigma functions, and the scapegoating of individual behaviours instead of tackling the deep-seated structures of violent inequity. 12/13
TL;DR: this is disingenuous BS.
Also, hopefully, the next time I present my work on abortion in India & I am (inevitably) asked ‘but what about SSA’, I can send them this thread & sigh as irritably as I’d like. 13/13
Also, hopefully, the next time I present my work on abortion in India & I am (inevitably) asked ‘but what about SSA’, I can send them this thread & sigh as irritably as I’d like. 13/13
