WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

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S. AGRAWAL - S. UNISA
the use of prenatal diagnostic techniques for the purpose of antenatal
sex determination.
Several studies have documented excess mortality among females
in India and other South Asian countries and have investigated its
association with such factors as educational differentials, parental
discrimination resulting from family-building strategies and marriage
patterns, and selective allocation of food and medical care. 3 Some of
the studies suggest that discrimination against daughters in feeding,
treatment, and care is likely to depend on the number and gender
composition of the couple’s living children (NFHS-2; Kishor, 2002;
Mishra et al., 2004). Very little is known regarding the reason and circumstances
under which a woman discriminates her children. Therefore,
in order to examine the root cause of gender discrimination in a
setting where the child sex ratio is highly masculine, it is valuable to
adopt a life-cycle approach.
We have investigated both qualitative and less explored factors
that can influence child sex ratio. In this study, we make use of the
ecological model of gender discrimination developed by Heise (1998).
As a first dimension in gender discrimination study, we consider the
individual perpetrator, i.e., the woman who has witnessed or experienced
discrimination, marital violence or child abuse in her childhood
(named here as ‘Childhood experience’). The diversity of synergistic
effects that impinge on childhood is often ignored by social scientists
(Liddell, 1998). Here, we argue that our attention to a mother must
start not once she has become a mother, neither when she is just about
to become a mother, but when she was an infant and a child, as what
happened to her during her own childhood may eventually determine
the adequacy of her physical and mental state as a mother (Gopalan,
1985).
Another dimension of gender discrimination examined in this
study relates to marital conflicts, wealth control and decision-making in
the family. Most of the time, it is found that women’s fertility is culturally
produced and controlled by marital arrangement. Hence, the importance
of married life in demographic analysis cannot be ignored as
women spend a major part of their life in marital union and their
behaviour is greatly influenced by its characteristics. Studies on marital
instability in some developing countries show that the presence of a
son in the family consistently decreases the likelihood of marital instability
(Merrill and Casterline, 1989). In this study, we posit that the
various spheres of women’s autonomy may affect their reproductive
3 See Kishore (1993), Bhuiya and Streatfield (1991), Bourne and Walker (1991), Das
Gupta (1987) and Miller (1984).