In India and China it is pretty common for rural people to prefer baby boys to baby girls. The advent of prenatal sex testing meant that women who found they were pregnant with girls would get abortions and hope the next pregnancy would be a boy. Today the NY Times published a story about an Indian man named Sunil Jaglan who led a successful campaign against this practice.

In India, the world’s most populous nation, and one which has experienced tremendous economic progress, gender inequality remains deeply entrenched. In many households, especially in rural areas, girls are considered a social and financial burden whose parents still pay thousands of dollars in dowry gifts to a husband’s family after arranging a marriage.

Despite an official ban on prenatal sex testing, advertisements for the service were pasted on market walls and highways across Haryana, and aborting fetuses because they were female was common…

Shortly before his own daughter’s birth, Mr. Jaglan had won an election as the village headman, and he was now determined to use his new role to begin a controversial campaign against the prenatal sex testing that he was sure was responsible for the alarming gender gap in his village, his state and many places across India.

Although it was not within his authority to do so — and some considered it an egregious invasion of privacy — Mr. Jaglan made it mandatory for village families to report a household pregnancy within four weeks, a decision that angered many in Bibipur and beyond.

Through a network of women informers, he and his team of volunteers would follow pregnant women like detectives when it was suspected they were being taken for prenatal sex tests. If that was indeed the case, they would work to have the woman’s husband or her in-laws arrested, with the police operating on the assumption that the pregnant woman herself had little or no say in the decision.

After four years of this the sex balance among newborns was nearly 50-50 and the idea was picked up by other towns in the region.

What strikes me as most remarkable about this story is that the Times is essentially taking a pro-life position, albeit one that’s not very controversial. Still it puts one specific type of abortion, which is somewhat common in India, in a bad light.

Not only that but the story is praising Jaglan for his pressure tactics to stop it. In case it wasn’t clear, he was treating unborn children at four weeks as worthy of government protection. He was having women follow other pregnant women to ensure they weren’t going for prenatal sex tests that would often precede a sex-selection abortion. And he was jailing or threatening to jail the men who took women for these appointments. If a law like this was proposed in Texas or Florida I’m pretty sure Democrats would be loudly opposing it and hoping to use it as an issue in the 2024 election.

This may be the only time I can remember a story in the NY Times framing any anti-abortion effort as (and the motives behind it) as noble. There’s nothing here about Jaglan trying to control women’s bodies to maintain the patriarchy. On the contrary he’s specifically framed as someone opposed to a patriarchal culture.

In 2015, Jaglan launched his most successful campaign which was called #SelfieWithDaughter. The idea was to get people to post photos with their daughters as a way to express pride in them. It really took off internationally after some celebrities and sports figures got involved. Recently it was highlighted again by PM Modi on the 100th episode of his monthly radio show Maan Ki Baat, which translates as speaking from the heart.

There are no comments on this story, unfortunately, and I’m not seeing much pushback on Twitter/X. Again, I don’t think sex-selection abortions are something Planned Parenthood wants to defend but the principles behind Jaglan’s efforts seem like ones they wouldn’t like people to think about very deeply.