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Sital Kalantry’s Women’s Human Rights and Migration: Sex Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India addresses a long-existing gap in feminist theory at the intersection of a migrant woman’s experience and culturally motivated reproductive decisions. By recognising the possibility that ‘practices that are oppressive to women in one country context may not have a negative impact on women in another country context’ Kalantry takes an important step in creating a framework for evaluating competing human rights interests within the complex cultural contexts that arise in migrant-receiving countries. Her proposed framework rejects the decontextualisation and politicisation of the migrant woman’s experience in favour of an appropriately nuanced approach, which inhabits a context-specific interstitial space between cultural relativist and universalist arguments.

Publication Citation

19 Asia-Pac. J. on Hum. Rts. & L. 69 (2018)