Contextualising stigma within unmarried women's experiences of abortion in India

Lazarus, Janice Namrata (2024) Contextualising stigma within unmarried women's experiences of abortion in India. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis is rooted in critical standpoint Feminist, brahmanical patriarchy and Reproductive Justice literature and is influenced by Feminist research methodologies. It is centred around unmarried women's lived experiences of abortion in urban India, as their voices are underrepresented in the dominant literature on abortion in India, owing to the deeply rooted patriarchal cultural norms that stigmatise out-of-marriage sex and pregnancy that compels unmarried women to be silent about their abortion experiences. In doing so, this thesis contributes empirically and theoretically to the existing literature on abortion. This study employs in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews as a method of data collection and interviews women who had abortions while unmarried in India as well as key research informants who include abortion rights advocates in India —drawing on the literature on abortion in India and its connectedness to brahmanical patriarchal gendered norms about sex, sexuality, reproduction, and womanhood. This thesis examines how the abortion experience is connected to hierarchical social power structures that are maintained and sustained through social institutions such as families, laws, medical systems, educational systems as well as economic and political institutions. Empirically, this thesis contributes new data on abortion in India by centring on unmarried women’s abortion experiences, which has been hard to collect as they are a hidden population. It argues that there is a gap between the dominant understanding of out-of-marriage sexual behaviour and the realities of young people’s experiences, enabling the stigmatisation of their abortion experiences. It recognises unmarried women’s abortion experiences as experiences of stigma. Theoretically, this thesis contributes to expanding stigma theory by examining how unmarried women navigate and resist the stigma of out-of-marriage sex and abortion by employing different strategies to protect themselves. It shifts the consideration of stigma related to unmarried women’s abortion beyond a superficial reading of ‘cultural taboo’. It argues that women make calculated choices informed by their analysis of their social and material realities, including their understanding of stigma related to out-of-marriage sex, pregnancy and abortion. Additionally, this thesis analyses stigma as being contagious as it moves beyond the pregnant woman to individuals and institutions associated with her. It argues that brahmanical patriarchal power structures of caste, religion and gender become sites of reproductive injustices. This, when analysed using the concept of Reproductive Justice, highlights that the caste structure, emphasising caste endogamy that controls women’s sexuality and reproduction within marriage, is a system of Reproductive Injustice. Using the concept of Reproductive Justice, this thesis analyses how dominant brahmanical patriarchal norms around sexuality and womanhood are embedded in the abortion discourse in India and enable the sustenance and maintenance of stigma related to out-of-marriage sex, pregnancy, and abortion. This critical reading, supported by the centeredness of this thesis on the lives and abortion experiences of unmarried women, provides new insights for the Feminist development of abortion policy and practice that caters to the needs of people seeking abortions and not patriarchal systems. Keywords: Abortion, Unmarried women, India, brahmanical patriarchy, Feminist Research Methodology, Reproductive Justice

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