Women’s Human Rights and Migration: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India by Sital Kalantry (review)

Women’s Human Rights and Migration: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India is a meticulously researched analysis and critique of sex-selective abortion policies and legislation in the United States that branches into multidisciplinary connections across a range of related fields. Author Sital Kalantry is a clinical professor of law, director of the International Human Rights Policy Advocacy Clinic, and co-director of the Migration and Human Rights Program at Cornell Law School. Her book is vitally important to academic scholars and policy makers interested in the complex intersections of transnational human rights law, women’s reproductive rights, immigration, and other concerns where competing human rights claims put women’s human rights at stake, as in the case she makes concerning legislation that affects sex-selective abortion and Asian immigrants in the United States. She writes, “In regulating practices of immigrants, advocates, legislators, and even some pro-choice feminists (erroneously) draw conclusions about the scope, motives, and impact of a practice based on their (mis)understanding of how the practice is undertaken in the country of origin of certain immigrants” (1).

Her book is divided into topical sections and she specifically addresses the issues through perceptive questions and statements of fact. Significantly, Kalantry demonstrates how misconceptions find their way into newspaper and magazine reports in articles such as “US Asians Show Bias for Boys” (110). Analyzing the politics of sex-selective abortion laws in the United States, Kalantry employs legal logic to demonstrate clearly that bans on sex selection in India and China produce radically different effects when applied to migrants living in the United States (93). Kalantry persuasively argues that decontextualizing cultural practices such as sex selection “homogenizes people” and produces unintentional harms based on flawed logic and historically tenacious misconceptions that anti-abortion advocates blame on “culture,” particularly “son preference” (134–136). She considers a wide array of arguments based on standard criminal arguments of intent and conduct and she analyzes specific loopholes in model bills and other exceptions to particular legal frameworks to unpack how legislatures frame legal codes based on faulty assumptions. By doing so, Kalantry offers correctives to certain stereotypes and misconceptions, thereby demonstrating why such bans do not work in the way they are intended (165).

Kalantry alerts pro-choice feminists in the United States that they have been deceived by anti-abortion activists and policy-shaping groups to gain their support for sex-selective abortion legislation that targets immigrant women of Asian descent by overemphasizing the role of culture rather than empirical data (83). Kalantry applies clinical methodology supported by the Cornell Survey Research Institute to update statistical data and correct erroneous and deceptive assumptions grounded in stereotypes that Asian Americans “have a sexist preference for sons and an aversion to daughters” that is carried over from their country of origin (126). Kalantry argues that while sex-selective abortions in Asia serve to correct unbalanced sex ratios in countries that favor boys and men, those cultural pressures do not apply to immigrants in the United States (134). While bans on sex-selective abortions in Asia serve to reduce the harms done to women and girls in those and other patriarchal nations, the context changes when migrants reach the United States, where they are motivated by the desire to have gender-balanced families (118–123). Thus, her study refutes the claims made by anti-abortion groups and policy makers who propose bans on sex-selective abortions based on the cultural preferences of the immigrants.

Kalantry draws on a transnational feminist legal approach and her expertise in international human rights law, particularly the Convention in the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), to situate a coherent ethic founded on harms-based discrimination against girls and women (63). The consequence of a lack of contextual clarity is that bans on sex-selective abortions have been “misappropriated...