Price to pay

Dowry serves to enhance women’s disadvantage in multiple ways. Giving dowry during marriage is often used to deny daughters the right to inherit natal property and assets. In reality, dowry payments often take the form of affinal presentations, as a gift to the family, rather than representing any real asset for the newly married woman. These have served to enhance women’s vulnerability within their marital homes and severely restrict their autonomy. The cycle of discrimination continues from natal to marital home and in turn leads to the continuation of discriminatory norms like the selective birth of sons.

This is by no means a comprehensive account of the complex circumstances — both at the macro and micro level — which has created a strong preference for sons and results in the systematic elimination of girls. For example, scholars have cited the shift from labour-intensive to mechanized agriculture as a factor that has contributed to further marginalize women within the household...In Punjab and Haryana, the Green Revolution resulted in a shift to cash crops and mechanization of agriculture, both of which led to a decline in the need for female labour. The accompanying prosperity served to increase ostentatious marriage ceremonies and also a demand for higher dowry...In these two states in particular, this perception of the economic liability of having daughters has resulted in widespread use of sex selection techniques.

Interestingly modernization, defined as increased access to education and communication technology, has contributed in the diffusion of sex determination and sex selective abortion. This is perceivable in the role that mass media plays in the spread of upper caste values with its accompanying anti-female bias. This bias is increasingly adopted by communities and caste groups that have traditionally been more egalitarian towards women but now accept discriminatory norms like dowry as part of their efforts for upward mobility... Another aspect of modernization that has played an important role has been the high rate of female literacy. This has in some instances equipped some women to be able to plan smaller families and at the same time be able to have the desired number of sons by undergoing SD and SSA...

This in brief is the context within which the son preference continues to persist and is translated into practices like SD and SSA ...these will not however be feasible for a large number of families unless technologies that allow this are not only available but also affordable and find some degree of support amongst the medical community.

Political Economy of Diagnostic Technologies: the emergence and use of prenatal diagnosis for sex selection needs to be examined in some detail. This becomes parti- cularly important to be able to understand the context in which a particular technology ...becomes widely used for SD as opposed to some other technique.