From “Female Foeticide” to “Gender Biased Sex Selection”: How NGOs Paved a Path to Abortion Rights in India

In this paper, I focus on understanding the interventions of NGO actors in sex selection discourse in India. Scholarship focuses on sex selection discourse in the law and the “female feticide” campaigns by women’s rights groups that successfully led to the enactment of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Test Act of 1994 and 2002, but little attention has been paid to the discursive changes in the subsequent years. Since the early 2000s, a significant point of contention for abortion rights focused NGOs has been the framing of sex selection as “female feticide”, and they have made concerted efforts to discursively separate abortion from sex selection in development programs and in policy language through changing terminology and discouraging the term “female feticide”. Using qualitative interviews with development professionals in abortion-focused NGOs, and historical analysis of written reflections by women’s rights activists who campaigned for laws against sex determination, I argue that terminological shifts in policy documentation away from “female feticide” and towards “gender biased sex selection” is not simply a move towards ‘politically correct’ language, but demonstrates a) a shift in the dominant framing of social issues, especially those related to women and girls over the last four decades, b) a shift in the primary sites of discursive transformation (from movements, to state, to internationally-informed development spaces), and c) a shift in the primary contributors to abortion discourse in India. I demonstrate that move away from ‘female feticide’ thus paves a discursive path for reconceptualizing abortion as a question of rights and further frames abortion as a standalone issue, distinct from other kinds of reproductive health rights. This paper draws from my on-going doctoral research on abortion rights, abortion law and policy, and transnational knowledge and funding flows in NGOs in India.