Louise Aurore Louvet and Susanne Ogner (2026)
Maya Unnithan is a social and medical anthropologist at the Department of Anthropology at Sussex and Director of the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction Technologies & Health (CORTH) since 2014. She works on issues of reproduction, global health, international development and human rights through the lens of social anthropology and gender politics.
NB: All of the information presented below are extracted from the interview conducted with Maya Unnithan, Susanne Ogner and Louise Aurore Louvet.
What are the underlying assumptions on anti-abortion positions?
Maya introduced the topic by underlining how abortion – and more broadly contraception – has always been a universally contested issue. She highlights how anti-abortion advocates are driven by a fear that contraception and abortion will be abused. Their rising social anxiety is regarding fertility decline and population trends, population control, and the related challenge to long-standing societal expectations.
Abortion rights are rooted in the freedoms of reproductive, bodily autonomy, and self-determination, freedoms that the patriarchy has controlled with an iron fist for a very long time. However, as Maya emphasized, the legalization of abortion and the widespread availability of contraception has “challenged patriarchal control over reproduction but not gone far enough in effecting social transformation”.
Maya underlined how discourse on the anti-rights and anti-gender movements’ paradoxically approach abortion from a demographic angle. On one hand, they express concern over potential demographic decline to argue that abortion should remain illegal. On the other hand, their discourse reveals a selective preference for some ethnic groups to grow or decline, which exposes their eugenic and racist motivations to justify the illegalization of abortion.
Additionally, the anti-abortion stance is entrenched in patriarchally determined socio-cultural gender roles, which are themselves driven by underlying normative assumptions about nature, biology and gender conceptions. Maya stressed how gender expectations dictate the behavior of men and women, crystallizing women’s roles to be about motherhood and childbearing obligations. By framing these roles as “natural” or “biological”, women remain bound to “natural expectations” of being reproducers, that are directly in conflict with abortion which is framed as “against nature”. These socio-cultural constructions are built on idealized conceptions of motherhood, based on maternal altruism and self-sacrifice, and are deeply embedded in public senses of morality and ideal parenthood. Socio-cultural expectations in turn pressure women into accepting gender roles that drastically contrast with abortion, viewing it as a rejection of motherhood. While Maya remains optimistic about challenging these beliefs, she emphasizes that these socio-cultural expectations are deeply engrained in moral values, which take time to dismantle.
Abortion and Son Preference
Maya further exemplified the social and cultural gender expectations imposed on men and women and its consequence for abortion through the example of son preference in China and India. Both have historically been patriarchal societies where most of the family and societal duties have fallen upon sons, symbolized by their duties during rituals of the patrilineage, such as funeral rituals. Son preference in such contexts became extremely important with relation to abortion practices with the arrival of population policies such as the one-child policy adopted in China in 1980. In light of the one child policy and the son being the only one able to support his family, what were the outcomes when a son was the only one who was allowed to conduct daily affairs? Son preference when combined with the one child policy led to a drastic rise in the secretive abortions of female fetuses following the implementation of the population policy. However, this situation was reversed after families started to invest in their daughters’ education and professional futures, making the girls equally able to support their families and build successful careers.
Nevertheless, the selective abortions created lingering demographic consequences for China, as Maya underlines. These sex-selective abortions both decreased the female population in China, created a demographic decline unable to sustain the aging of the population, that China strove to reverse. Maya pinpoints additional social consequences noted by scholars, in which the only child policy has created problems of socialization for children and a rise of individualism within the family.
The legalization of abortion spurred the emergence of a new social anxiety rooted in this alleged “loss of control” of reproduction, which first includes the issue of patrilineage that favors male inheritance of the family’s belongings. This anxiety over domestic inheritance has spurred a renewal of anti-abortion arguments to support childbearing required for the growth of the family’s or community’s lineage.
The association between reproduction and economic growth puts further pressure on women’s required fertility. Maya emphasized how such requirements constrain reproductive justice, regarded as the right to choose when to reproduce.
‘Son preference’ created similar consequences in India, though with some differences. India’s ‘family planning program’ continuously encouraged families to be smaller to slow population growth, but coupled with the son preference, it led to sex-selective abortions. As a result, India faced a “missing women phenomenon”, where there are not enough women for men to marry in the country. The State ultimately intervened with punitive laws to condemn the individuals who offered and sought these secretive abortions.
Maya and the interviewers discussed how son preference and patriarchal contexts have created a paradoxical situation. Societies which have set out to prevent son preference leading to selective abortion of females have led to a rise of illegal abortions, which are in turn condemned with punitive laws. While these States repress abortions, they have simultaneously created a context that reinforces the preference of one gender over the other. This vicious cycle led to a rise of unsafe abortions, most often performed in unhygienic conditions, resulting in infections and potential deaths.
Maya and the interviewers agreed on emphasized the paradoxical nature of the situation, and the need for abortion to be legalized to avoid such tragic situations. Ensuring a safe and unrestricted access to sexual reproductive health and rights is a priority to guarantee safe abortion care. Women who will choose to undergo the process, whether it is legal or not, so it is the responsibility of the state to ensure the practice is safe.
Losing body autonomy and gender discrimination through ‘biology’.
Maya talked further about the biological discrimination that women continuously face regarding motherhood and childbearing “obligations”. This discrimination is entrenched in biologically based perception of women’s roles as the main agents of reproduction, which according to patriarchal assumptions, deprives them of the same body autonomy as men. The lack of full control over their own body is based on such biologically framed perceptions, which Maya denounces as “completely discriminatory”. Women’s individual rights and bodily autonomy are strictly limited by a sense of patriarchal obligation, which restrains their freedoms.
Maya underlines how this discrimination becomes concrete at a medical level. For example, the UK Abortion Act posits that in case of breach of the official abortion protocol, women risk imprisonment. In other cases, women must attend medical boards to gain approval from medical authority to undergo the abortion process. These procedures undermine women’s bodily autonomy by constraining them to strict medical authority and pressure them with the prospect of imprisonment, something that Maya finds appalling.
Maya further deplores how this loss of control over one’s own body reduces women to their biology, which completely bypasses their rights to self-determination. Women’s biological functions overshadow their personal preferences in a context where their value is dependent on their fertility and reproductive functions rather than their freedom. Both Maya and the interviewers were struck that while patriarchal assumptions praise the value of female fertility, they paradoxically embrace extreme “masculine” characteristics, which are driven by the rejection of “femininity”.
Future potential outcomes on sexual reproductive rights.
While the challenges that are posed to reproductive rights and women´s control over their own bodies are deeply concerning, Maya shows positivity. She believes that change is not only possible but happening right now. She has been teaching about reproductive rights and fertility since 1998 at the University in Sussex, which slowly has attracted more male students over time, and notes an increased presence of men in abortion-right protests. With an emphasis on education, we could change patriarchal ideas and foster collective action.
To read more about Maya’s work, click here to see her page and here to see her work as a fellow for LawTransform !