Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context

In the mid-1990s, the international community pronounced prenatal sex selection via abortion an "act of violence against women" and "unethical." At the same time, new developments in reproductive technology in the United States led to a method of sex selection before conception; its US inventor marketed the practice as "family balancing" and defended it with the rhetoric of freedom of choice. In Gender before Birth, Rajani Bhatia takes on the double standard of how similar practices in the West and non-West are divergently named and framed.

Bhatia's extensive fieldwork includes interviews with clinicians, scientists, biomedical service providers, and feminist activists, and her resulting analysis extends both feminist theory on reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. She argues that we are at the beginning of a changing transnational terrain that presents new challenges to theorized inequality in reproduction, demonstrating how the technosciences often get embroiled in colonial gender and racial politics.

Author: Rajani Bhatia
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 02/01/2018
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780295999210

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2019

About the Author

Rajani Bhatia is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the University at Albany, SUNY.