Posted on behalf of Sital Kalantry

New Book: Women’s Human Rights and Migration: Sex-Selective Abortion Law in the United States and India published by the University of Pennsylvania Press 2017

In this new book, I examine prohibitions on sex-selective abortion that are sweeping state legislatures across the United States from a critical race, empirical, and feminist perspective.  I argue that supporters of the bans use misinformation and stereotypes about India and Indian-Americans. Some pro-choice legislators, accepting the de-contextualized information, voted in favor of the bans. I argue that practices brought by immigrants across borders  challenge us to think about human rights outside of the traditional paradigm of universality v. cultural relativism. In regulating women’s practices, I argue for a transnational and comparative approach that gives us better insight into the contextual factors that make a practice discriminatory. Focusing specifically on the problem of sex-selection in India, I believe we need to see the sex ratio crises as a public policy problem and consider solutions that address the dangerous consequences of a male surplus rather than only the causes of it.  Here an op-ed of mine in the New York Times flows from the book though is not directly related to its core themes:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/opinion/how-to-fix-indias-sex-selection-problem.html?smid=tw-share.