one-child policy has historically influenced the behavior of Chinese parents, but India has never had such a drastic policy.
Second, the discourse assumes that all Asian Americans share the same behaviors. This is problematic, because it fails to understand the differences in behavior and values among this group. Asian Americans include Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and others. Each of these groups is influenced by different religious, linguistic and cultural patterns. “Asian American” is a common label in the United States—it is used by scholars, advocacy organizations,43 and social organizations.44 Many universities have departments called “Asian American Studies.”45 I use “Asian American” to include people who have recently immigrated from or whose parents, grandparents or other generations have emigrated from a country in Asia. It should be noted that there is disagreement about what groups should be included under the umbrella “Asian American,” and whether the category should be abandoned altogether given the plurality of people who are swept into that category.
Third, discussions of sex-selective abortion also fail to portray a more nuanced story about what occurs in foreign countries. India is a religiously and linguistically diverse country. Indeed, many states in India do not have male-skewed ratios at all. In the Indian state of Kerala, for example, the ratio of males born to females is close to the natural range. This suggests that parental sex-selection is not occurring. There is no one fixed “culture” that prevails throughout India as the discourse implies. However, there is no recognition of intracountry variation in sex-selection practices in the mainstream American discourse.
Fourth, the discourse assumes that the “culture” of people who live in Asia is the same as the “culture” of Asian Americans. It assumes (1) people in Asia favor sons over daughters, (2) this preference is caused by culture, and (3) these same cultural patterns replicate themselves among Asian Americans. The extreme version of this viewpoint ignores the role of context in shaping people’s behavior. It fails to acknowledge that specific social norms such as dowry or employment opportunities for women also influence behavior.
Finally, the discussions relating to the bans fail to recognize and distinguish between first- and second-generation immigrants. People from Asia first came to the United States as slaves and laborers in the late eighteenth century. Later, there was an influx of Chinese immigrants during the gold rush.46 Today, 79% of Asian American adults are foreign born.47 Most of the remaining 21% are likely second-generation immigrants, which means that they were born and raised in the United States. While recent immigrants may have cultural traits in common with people from their country of origin, the longer that immigrants live in the United States, the more they are likely to take on characteristics of the mainstream culture. This is often referred to as “assimilation.” Our research on sex ratios bears this out. When my coauthors compared the ratio of male to female children born to second-generation Asian Americans and Caucasian Americans in the American Community Survey from 2008 to 2012, we found no significant differences in the sex ratios for these two groups.
Certainly both first-generation and second-generation Indian immigrants share similarities with people living in India. They may celebrate the same religious holidays and share common values, foods, and traditions. The sex-selective abortion debate takes the comparison too far—it fails to see any distinctions between the two groups. Yet, people of Indian descent living in the United States clearly recognize these distinctions. Second-generation immigrants derogatorily refer to recent immigrants as “FOBs” or “fresh off the boat.” Indian Americans born in the United States are sometimes referred to as ABCDs or “American Born Confused Desis.” Desi derives from desh, which means nation or country, and a desi is a person from that country. It is used colloquially to mean someone from the homeland.48 These labels reflect Indian Americans’ own understanding of themselves as a diverse group.
A crude theory of assimilation would posit that the longer an immigrant has lived in another country, the less likely she is to share cultural characteristics with people from her country of origin.49 Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Amish people retain their distinctive traditions and language even though they have lived in the United States for generations.50 They are able to do this because they remain geographically isolated, do not send their children to American public schools, and limit their interactions with contemporary society.51 While some Indian Americans live in predominately Indian American communities, they are not isolated in the same way as the Amish.
Adopting laws based on decontextualized knowledge is problematic not only because it means that a law is adopted without properly reflecting on whether it addresses a problem in the jurisdiction where it is adopted, but also because there are other potential negative consequences. Indeed, the bans will lead to the profiling of Asian American women who are seeking abortions. The bans will create access barriers to all women who in some states now have to answer a battery of questions in order to obtain an abortion. Finally, if ruled constitutional, the bans will open the door to a host of other “reason-based” pre-viability restrictions, which would further limit the right to choose even during the first trimester.
Legislative representative advocates voting for the ban might assume that a practice that is prevalent in the country of origin of the migrant will also be replicated among immigrants when they move to their new home. This is because they may think that the practice is ingrained in the culture of the immigrant, which culture they believe to be the same or similar to the culture of people living in the country of origin of the migrant. This view is incorrect because culture is not fixed—it changes over time. In addition, there is an overemphasis on culture in understanding the reasons for an immigrant’s behavior and an underemphasis on context, as I explain in the next section.
References to the situation in other countries may simply be a strategic move by anti-abortion advocates. Those arguments are used to justify their primary goal—placing restrictions on abortion. Yet their advocacy sways people who do not normally support their goals (e.g., pro-choice people). In fact, many pro-choice state legislators have voted for these bans—I discuss this in Chapter 3. I argue below that assumptions about the behavior of Asian Americans made by some pro-choice feminists rest on a mistaken view about culture.
Culture vs. Context in Understanding Immigrant Behavior
In migrant-receiving countries, the role of culture is often overemphasized in explaining the behavior and acts of immigrants and their progeny. If “son preference” is thought to be part of the culture of people living in Asia, then it will be assumed that it is a widespread sentiment among Asian Americans if mainstream communities believe that culture is fixed and unchanging and that it is what drives the behavior of immigrants. On the other hand, too little emphasis is given to context in shaping behavior.
There is no agreed-on definition of “culture” across disciplines. I use “culture” to mean not just customs, usages, traditions, or habit clusters, but a set of control mechanisms for the governing of behavior.52 When I refer to “context” I mean factors that are outside of a person that guide and shape behavior. While a particular behavior can be motivated largely by “culture,” it could also be shaped by the specific situation and norms that the person encounters. Along the lines of what Knop, Michaels, and Riles call the “post-essentialist critique” of culture, I accept the view that a person’s culture is not fixed; it is dynamic and may change in response to his or her surrounding context.53
Uma Narayan observes how many people in the United States define the behavior of people who live in India by their culture. She points out how the media and popular American views frame murders of married women in India as products of Indian culture (“dowry death”), while murders by abusive domestic partners in the United States are not framed in cultural terms.54 Narayan points out how a similar incident (the murder of a wife by her husband) when it emerges in a
