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Boy or girl? Prenatal selection of a child's gender

A mother's musings about her child's life as a girl

The day of my interview with Gurpreet (all names are changed) is also, coincidentally, the day of her daughter's birthday celebration. "I forgot about it when I said you can come over to my house!" she explained apologetically in Punjabi when I arrived. "Koi gal nahi, auntie!" I responded, letting her know it was hardly a problem. My interviews are never formal—almost invariably, my tape recorder ends up being fairly useless since most of the conversation ends up happening when we are on our feet, shuffling towards the kitchen for chai or chaat, or roaming the house and backyard to monitor children during their escapades. So doing an interview in the midst of preparations for a birthday party comes at no surprise or cost. In fact, this setting proves to be extraordinarily revealing.

Editor's Note: The photo of a child displayed on the campus home page serves to illustrate this story and is not an image of the child described in this story.
  
 

Gurpreet, like Vandana, fought hard for an education. She was the third daughter in a family of five—four daughters and one son—and her parents worked hard to be able to educate all of their children. Gurpreet asked me about my own education, and we compared college life in India and America. She couldn't imagine living in a hostel, just as I knew that college life would have been so different had I lived at home and commuted. During our initial conversation in a mix of Punjabi, Hindi, and English, Gurpreet's daughter Simran bobs her head up and down shyly over the countertop as I assist Gurpreet by cutting onions, tomatoes, garlic, and ginger for the daal she is making. When I am done preparing the tadka for the daal, I put in a phone call to Domino's for Gurpreet, ordering two large vegetarian pizzas for Simran and her friends. "Tell them I want more onions!" Simran pipes up.

"So what do you want to know about my life?" Gurpreet asked me. "Remember that my mother-in-law is here visiting," she added quietly. "If she comes in the kitchen, let's talk about some film or something like that." The pressure cooker erupted behind us, emitting the garlicky smell of the daal she was preparing.

"Things became hard once Simran was born," she told me. "It's hard to talk about … Little, little things changed. My husband's family didn't welcome me, really. They wanted a boy, of course. Especially the first-born." She put down the can of Duncan Hines vanilla frosting she was applying liberally over Simran's birthday cake. "These traditions have been there for thousands of years. They don't just suddenly go away once people leave India. But still, somehow it feels worse that it happens here, right? I thought that I was coming here to have a better life."

Gurpreet's words and insight raised a question in my mind of what immigrant women such as herself defined as the proverbial "better life." When I asked her, she said, "We always think of our children first. That is why I agreed to come here. It was hard for me to make that decision. I did not imagine it any differently whether I had a boy or a girl. The child would be a child for me, and I wanted to give it a good education, a cleaner place to live, all of that. If my child was happy and well, then I would have my better life." Did she think that differed from how her husband defined the "better life?" After a few seconds, she responded, "Yes and no. He wanted to be able to be a better provider for his family, to get us things we couldn't get in India. But all of that is still for the children, right?"

She lowered her voice, and switched into a mix of Hindi and English, so that her mother-in-law would not hear or understand her. "I have to tell you. You know that for desi log it's very bad if you cannot have a child. But what is hard to understand is why people look down on you if you have a child and it's a girl. What difference does it make? A child is a child. But maybe to them it is not really a child unless it's a boy."

She began to tell me about her own sister, who was living in Chandigarh while pregnant. Her husband's family asked her to have "the scan" (meaning an ultrasound) done to determine whether the child was a boy or girl. While the use of medical technology for this purpose is illegal in India, clinics do still offer sex determination to patients who are willing to pay for it. Gurpreet's sister learned that she was having a girl.

"It was so bad," Gurpreet said. "I was the only person she spoke to about this. I told her not to get the scan done, but what choice did she have? She kept the baby. Her mother-in-law treated her very badly while she was pregnant. She made her work all the time, even when she was sick. I didn't understand why another woman was treating my sister like this. Her husband didn't say anything. I guess that's good because he didn't make it worse, but he didn't protect her either. If her baby was a boy, they would have taken good care of her to have a healthy baby. We didn't tell our parents anything because we didn't want them to worry."

I have noticed that oftentimes, women will talk about others—their friends, sisters, mothers—before talking about their own situations, if at all. When I asked whether she had experienced anything akin to the experiences of her sister, Gurpreet was reluctant to get into the specifics of her own situation, and I did not want to push her too much. I helped her to decorate the living room for Simran's party, hanging balloons and criss-crossing streamers to create an elaborate burst of colors on the wall facing the entrance. Half an hour later, when we were finished, Gurpreet started talking again. "I sometimes wish for Simran's sake that she was a boy. Life would be much easier for her. Is that a bad thing?"

I felt a mix of emotions as I pondered her question. Anger, frustration, and confusion, all because Gurpreet should never have to think this way, or to ask these questions. Tenderness and empathy because it was quite clear that all she wanted, more than anything, was for her child to be happy and to be totally loved and supported. But why should gender have anything to do with that? And, why should Simran's gender have anything to do with Gurpreet's experiences within her family? Or her sister's experiences within her own family? Violating the "never answer a question with a question" law, I asked Gurpreet what made her feel bad about making that comment.

"It's wrong," she said. "I myself am a woman! Why should I wish that my child is a boy? But I don't want her to live what I have lived. Women everywhere suffer. Even women cause the suffering of other women," she said, glancing knowingly towards the room where her mother-in-law rested. "So if men cause women to suffer, and women cause women to suffer … is it not natural I would want my daughter to be away from all of that?"

Gurpreet's musings make me think of one of the complicated arguments for sex selective abortions: if a woman knows that her girl child will either be mistreated, outright killed, or deprived of necessary nutrition and care when born, is it necessarily wrong to abort the child before such things happen? Of course, none of those things should happen in the first place, but some have argued that to deprive women of this choice is to cause even more harm and potential inhumane suffering for the child.

This brings me back to a question in an earlier dispatch: does banning technology for these purposes do anything to alleviate the reasons why such technologies are used in the first place? What about women who really do not want their daughters to experience what they have experienced? Does it affect a mother's relationship with her child if her child is used as reason to mistreat her?

"Not at all," Gurpreet told me. "Simran has no part in this. But for her sake, I wish that she didn't see some of the things that are said to me. She is smart. She will ask me, 'Mummi, why does dadiji yell at you?' I think that is bad, that my child sees all of this." When I ask Gurpreet whether she would have used any medical assistance to have a boy, she immediately says no. "I've always wanted a little girl," she says. "And I don't think that it's right for doctors to intervene in these matters. It makes things hard for women."

Simran's friends begin to arrive in small groups. Some of them are friends from school, and some are friends from gurdwara. Simran comes running out of her room to greet her friends, her eyes growing wide at some of the glossy, colorful presents and wrapping paper. Gurpreet begins greeting mothers and siblings, welcoming them to her home, inviting them to stay for tea before leaving. I stand back watching Gurpreet greeting different mothers in different ways, trying her best to make everyone feel equally welcome. I feel honored to be able to watch this scene, to be invited into the lives of the women and children I work with. I only hope that what comes of my research project is useful to them, either in dialogue or in policy, because they all deserve nothing but happiness.

—Sunita

Sunita Puri is a 2005 Summer Fellow of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center.