Clinics' Pitch to Indian Émigrés: It's a Boy
By Susan Sachs,
The New York Times
| 08. 15. 2001
The pitch could not be more direct. The intended audience could not
be more specific.
"Desire a Son?" asked an advertisement in recent editions
of India Abroad, a weekly newspaper for Indian expatriates in the
United States and Canada.
"Choosing the sex of your baby: new scientific reality,"
declared another in the same publication. A third ad ran in both India
Abroad and the North American edition of The Indian Express. "Pregnant?"
it said. "Wanna know the gender of your baby right now?"
Some people would call it niche marketing — an effort by companies
to promote their products to one of the country's fastest-growing
ethnic groups.
But the products in question are not chewing gum or financial services.
They are procedures to preselect the sex of a child or, in the case
of one advertiser, to identify the sex of the fetus as early as five
weeks into a pregnancy. And the target market is immigrants from India,
where sex-determination tests were outlawed seven years ago in a still
unsuccessful effort to thwart the widespread practice of aborting
female...
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