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In India, sex-selective abortion is an established phenomenon that cuts across rural/urban, educational and socioeconomic status divides. However, in understanding this complex and deeply contextualized issue, kinship patterns, dowry and the low social value accorded to women are often mobilized to serve as overarching explanations. While these factors are important in explaining sex-selection, in an effort to expand beyond the generalizing discourse that exercises a single point focus on patriarchal cultural practices, this paper centralizes the role of institutional structures. Specifically, the paper explores state population control policies and the unchecked utilization of reproductive technologies to uncover the contemporary institutional factors that lend sex-selective abortion a normative appeal. Moreover, legal approaches to eradicating sex-selective abortion are examined in tandem with feminist conceptualizations of the issue to uncover the efficacy and dynamics of institutional responses to sex-selection in India. The paper asserts the importance of an integrative approach for understanding and responding to sex-selection, both at the macro and micro level.

The premature elimination of female foetuses is a widespread phenomenon in Asian countries. In fact, Amartya Sen (2003) has uncovered that in the last century,“100 million women have been missing in South Asia due to" discrimination leading to death’experienced by them from womb to tomb in their life cycles”(as cited in Patel 2007: 289). For instance, in China in 2000 the child sex ratio at birth was 120 males per 100 females. In the more prosperous provinces of the country such as …