Women's Human Rights and Migration: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India

Abstract

Sital Kalantry’s Women’s Human Rights and Migration: Sex Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India addresses a long-existing gap in feminist theory at the intersection of a migrant woman’s experience and culturally motivated reproductive decisions. By recognising the possibility that ‘practices that are oppressive to women in one country context may not have a negative impact on women in another country context’ Kalantry takes an important step in creating a framework for evaluating competing human rights interests within the complex cultural contexts that arise in migrant-receiving countries. Her proposed framework rejects the decontextualisation and politicisation of the migrant woman’s experience in favour of an appropriately nuanced approach, which inhabits a context-specific interstitial space between cultural relativist and universalist arguments.

Keywords: Law and culture, feminist theory, women’s rights, sex-selective abortion, feminist theory, migration, discrimination, postcolonialism, It’s a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words, reproductive rights