Culturally Relative Rights? Female Foeticide as a Violation of Gender Equality

This post is by Amrita Kumar-Ratta and is a part of the Culture and Human Rights series (Part II).

As cultures confront and co-mingle with each other across political and social boundaries, the context of universal human rights assumes a new challenge: how to adapt a culturally sensitive approach to the discourse on women’s human rights. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has identified gender equality as “first and foremost, a human right.” However, as Sally Merry notes, this notion of gender equality has been difficult to establish in certain local contexts, since “gender violence is deeply embedded in systems of kinship, religion, warfare, and nationalism.”  This complex nexus of culture, gender and humans rights is exemplified by prevailing practices such as forced marriage, female genital mutilation, female foeticide and honour killings, among others – each practiced in different international contexts and each defended on the grounds of religio-cultural authenticity.

Given the complexity that characterizes the present relationship between liberal democratic ideals of gender equality and cultural diversity, a fundamental question arises: How can we challenge the consequences that some cultural ideals present for women’s rights without infringing upon the growing importance of cultural inclusion? It seems we must not look simply and uncritically to culture as the harbinger of fundamentalisms that threaten women’s rights. Rather, we must seek to challenge certain oppressive ideas and practices that use religio-cultural frameworks to justify a breach in the human right of gender equality.  After all, as CIDA has made clear time and again, the recognition of women’s rights are integral to sustainable development at all levels.

Moreover, it is important that we recognize that the notion of ‘cultural authenticity’ is as heterogeneous as culture itself.  What constitutes culturally appropriate and what is deemed tradition differs remarkably across contexts and among individuals. As such, many communities – countries, ethnic groups, political institutions, religious authorities - have not yet recognized the breach of women’s rights as human rights violations. And while only one human rights treaty, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), explicitly targets culture and tradition as “influential forces shaping gender roles and family relations”, we often forget that the cultural assumptions implied within such human rights discourses also constitute a unique definition of culture. So, while CEDAW might stress the necessity for modification of socio-cultural patterns of conduct to promote gender equality, the absence of any standardized idea of cultural authenticity makes this a difficult task.

Philosopher K.A. Appiah has thus rightly stated that in an increasingly globalized world where the tension between gender and culture takes diverse forms, our primary concern should not be the preservation of traditional modes of culture, but instead the well-being of individuals. The space between gender and culture must thus be conceptualized so that individual autonomy is prioritized over any abstract notion of culture defined by those who claim authority over it. Once we stop prioritizing cultures over individuals, we can challenge those relgio-cultural authoritites and those cultural frameworks which contribute to the varied forms of gender-based violence that pervade our world today. Among the many examples of  the tension between gender, culture, and human rights, one of the most glaring is the selective abortion of female foetuses – commonly referred to as ‘female foeticide’ – which has resulted in the ‘disappearance’ of well over 100 million girls worldwide in the last quarter century. Rightly defined as ‘violence against women’ in the 1995 Platform for Action in Beijing, Sally Merry has pointed out that selective abortion certainly “became the prototype of a practice justified by custom and culture and redefined as an act of violence and a breach of women’s human rights.”

Son preference, for a variety of economic, socio-cultural and religious reasons, has occurred in most societies for centuries; this was expressed somewhat crudely by American boxer Muhammad Ali when he told a reporter that he had fathered “one boy and seven mistakes.”  An Indian proverb expresses this disdain for daughters more colourfully:  “Raising a daughter is like watering a shady tree in someone else’s courtyard.” Such ideas  have provoked tension between the cultural justification of female foeticide and the condemnation of its practice as a breach of human rights; certainly, it shows an urgency for an approach which privileges individual rights over any preconceived notion of culture. In India, such a practice stirs tension between ‘cultural mores’ and ‘sexual equality’; in Canada, it incites conflict between national goals of fostering religio-cultural pluralism and defending women’s rights as democratic obligation.  In the context of human rights, both of these examples shed light on the need for ‘gender equality’ and ‘cultural identity’ to engage in conversation.

In India, the 2001 Census revealed that up to 120 males were born for every 100 females. It also revealed 830 girls aged 0-6 years for every 1,000 boys of the corresponding age, illustrating the sharp decline in the country’s juvenile sex ratio since the 1980s. There is a general agreement that these distortions are largely the result of selective abortion, since estimates from the fertility and mortality survey of 1998 have translated into approximately 10 million female fetuses getting aborted over the past two decades. Tulsi Patel notes that in India, “the exceedingly greater care and vigilance in raising daughters and in protecting their sexuality, in arranging for grooms, dowry, and life long presentations and gifts, are conducive in making girls an avoidable proposition.”  The pervasiveness of son preference in contemporary India becomes especially evident when studying the 2011 Census, which revealed 914 females against 1000 males, the lowest sex ratio India has seen since independence in 1947.

In Canada, a society characterized by “deep diversity”,  the practice of female foeticide illustrates a unique problem; that is, a continuous tension between preserving sexual equality and promoting cultural equality. According to Sam Solomon, in Ontario and British Columbia, two provinces with the highest number of Indian immigrants in the country, the practice of selective abortion has proved to be a real problem – for abortion laws, for legislature on human rights and for Canadian multiculturalism.

Note that there is currently no explicit law against selective abortion in Canada. The Assisted Human Reproduction Act only restricts sex selection in-vitro, not in-utero. While the general public is opposed to the practice and the majority of doctors and hospitals have refused to provide sex-determination tests to women who wish to use it for the purpose of selective abortion, the occurrence of female foeticide among Indian immigrants in Canada certainly exemplifies the growing tensions surrounding gender and culture that permeate today’s world.

There are grassroots movements trying to raise awareness about the practice of female foeticide in Canada and how this presents a dilemma between the cultural equality and sexual equality that Canada espouses. In Brampton, Ontario for instance, local women’s groups and ethnic health centres have started raising awareness about repressive cultural notions of son preference and about human rights and gender equality as core values of Canadian society.

Such a specific incidence of the larger problem of gender versus culture speaks to the larger need to recognize the internal dynamism of culture; after all, cultures are not fossilized. They are dynamic and are constantly in the midst of change, sometimes from certain external influences and sometimes from within themselves. Moreover, progressive elements within all societies also recognize that certain practices in a culture are oppressive and need to be changed. Sarah Song’s approach of  rights-respecting accomodationism embodies this very notion that, “ ‘culture’ is not the problem; oppressive practices are.” As such, we do not have to rid ourselves of the notion of cultural accommodation; rather, she has said, by privileging individual women’s autonomy, we can collectively “challenge aspects of cultural traditions that support women’s subordination.”

As has been repeatedly expressed, conceptions of gender are inextricably tied to one’s cultural framework which is, according to the UNFPA, in turn “fundamental to the design of effective programmes that help people and nations realize human rights.” To advance a goal of approaching human rights with certain cultural sensitivity, emphasis must increasingly be placed on the importance of creatively challenging the use of culture (as defined by any one institution) to justify a breach in the universal human right of gender equality. Through intercultural democratic dialogue as well as an international constitution that prioritizes the individual, we may attempt to soften – and hopefully extinguish – grossly oppressive practices like female foeticide.

Amrita Kumar-Ratta, from Brampton, Ontario, recently completed her undergraduate degree in International Development Studies and World Religions at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She has a global spirit and is passionate about issues of international development, global migration and women’s rights. Having co-founded an initiative called ‘Save the Girls’ in Brampton, and recently completing comparative research on sex-selective abortion in Canada and India, Amrita is currently working for Jagori Grameen, a feminist organization in Dharmshala, India that works to facilitate the empowerment of youth, women and marginalized farmers in rural Himachal Pradesh. In addition to the work she has done for community organizations in the Toronto area, she has also worked among the Maasai Peoples in Kenya, and has attended numerous global leadership conferences in Europe and in Canada.  

You can contact Amrita at amrita[dot]kumarratta[at]gmail.com.

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