“We can ask whether there is an investment in both law and policy as ‘performatives’: as if they do what they say, as if they bring something into existence” (Ahmed, 2012: 11).

In January 2026, the Mail on Sunday reported a “record number” of baby girls allegedly being aborted by Indian-origin parents in the United Kingdom, citing data attributed to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The claim quickly gained traction, circulating across national and international media and advocacy organisations. Subsequent reports repeated the Mail on Sunday claim with little or no interrogation of its evidentiary basis. Yet no publicly available ONS dataset provides a combined breakdown of parental ethnicity and the sex of aborted foetuses that could substantiate such a conclusion.

So where did the certainty come from?

I pursued this question through my research into the racial politics of reproductive panic in Britain. The issue was not simply whether a newspaper had interpreted the statistics correctly, but how an uncertain statistical claim could become an apparently established social fact, and what happens when that claim concerns the reproductive practices of a racialised community.

Sex-selective abortion raises serious questions about gender inequality, reproductive autonomy and discrimination. The argument here is not that sex selection, son preference or gendered inequality do not exist. The more difficult question is how legitimate concern about gender inequality becomes transformed into broader claims about the culture and reproductive behaviour of an entire community on the basis of limited evidence. That distinction becomes particularly important when we look more closely at the data.

What do the numbers actually tell us?

A partial basis for these claims can be found in an earlier UK Government analysis of sex ratios at birth between 2017 and 2021. The analysis identified a statistically significant imbalance among children of Indian ethnicity in families with two or more previous births. Crucially, however, the government’s wording was cautious: the finding “may indicate that sex-selective abortions are taking place”. The analysis estimated approximately 400 possible cases within 3.6 million births and explicitly stated that it had found no other evidence suggesting sex-selective abortion in the UK during this period.

Gestational timing complicates the picture further. Government data showed that 87.5% of abortions among Indian women with two or more previous births occurred before eight weeks, while only 298 took place at eighteen weeks or later, when foetal sex is more likely to be identifiable through NHS pathways. This does not rule out sex-selective abortion, but it does complicate any direct move from an unusual sex ratio to certainty about its cause.

The distinction may seem small, but it is crucial. “The evidence may indicate” is very different from “record numbers of baby girls are being aborted.” Somewhere between those two formulations, uncertainty became certainty.

When uncertainty becomes moral panic

Once the claim entered the media ecosystem, it travelled. It appeared across mainstream newspapers, advocacy organisations, international news platforms and social media. CARE UK, for example, reported the claim under the headline “Baby girls aborted in record numbers in UK Indian communities”, drawing on the Mail on Sundayinvestigation. As claims move between platforms, methodological qualifications can be reduced while repetition itself begins to produce authority.

This process recalls Stanley Cohen’s concept of moral panic: how a condition, person or group comes to be represented as a threat to societal values and interests. What interests me about this case is not simply whether the media response was disproportionate. It is how the apparent certainty of the threat was itself produced. Statistical uncertainty becomes a story of cultural deviance, while Indian-origin families become increasingly legible as reproductive “folk devils”. The unborn girl, meanwhile, becomes a powerful symbol of vulnerability requiring protection.

There is an important tension here: concern about discrimination against girls is legitimate. Son preference and gender inequality should not be dismissed. But recognising gender inequality does not require treating an ethnically diverse population as culturally uniform.

Who is being saved — and from whom?

This tension has a much longer history. Postcolonial feminist scholars have repeatedly questioned representations in which women from the Global South are imagined primarily as victims of oppressive cultures. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes critiques the production of the “Third World woman” as a singular subject defined through oppression, obscuring differences of history, class and social position. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? extends this concern by asking who is authorised to represent marginalised subjects and whose voices become intelligible within dominant systems of knowledge.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?takes this critique into the politics of rescue, questioning narratives that reduce complex women’s lives to evidence of oppressive cultures requiring external intervention. Something similar occurs when Indian-origin women are represented simultaneously as victims of patriarchal culture and evidence of that culture’s pathology. In the reporting I examined, Indian-origin women’s own voices and lived contexts were largely absent. Instead, their experiences were mediated through statistics, institutional authority and journalistic interpretation. They appeared as victims requiring protection, reproductive subjects generating demographic concern, or carriers of cultural tradition.

The question therefore shifts. Instead of asking only whether these women are being oppressed, we might also ask: Who is producing knowledge about them? What evidence is being used? Whose explanation becomes authoritative? And what happens when uncertainty disappears from the story?

Why this matters beyond a newspaper headline

These questions have consequences beyond media representation. Reproductive decisions concerning pregnancy, abortion, fertility and motherhood are shaped by race, migration, class and institutional power. Reproductive justice scholarship has long demonstrated how racialised women’s reproductive lives can become subject to particular forms of scrutiny and regulation.

When reproductive practices are framed as evidence of cultural incompatibility or deviance, the consequences can extend into policy and professional practice. This matters for social workers encountering families whose cultural backgrounds may already be stereotyped. It matters for healthcare professionals interpreting reproductive decisions. It matters for legal professionals and policymakers considering interventions presented as protecting women. And it matters for researchers deciding what counts as authoritative evidence about marginalised communities.

The danger is not that we discuss sex-selective abortion. The danger is that concern for gender equality can become detached from evidentiary caution and attached instead to racialised assumptions about culture. In that process, a language intended to protect women can paradoxically make some women more visible as objects of suspicion while making their own voices less visible.

Reading reproductive statistics differently

None of this establishes that sex-selective abortion never occurs among Indian-origin families in Britain. Nor should criticism of racialised reporting be used to minimise gender discrimination.

The argument is more careful than either conclusion. Statistical irregularity is not automatically evidence of cultural pathology. Correlation does not establish reproductive intention. And institutional authority attached to a statistic does not remove the need to ask what the underlying data can actually demonstrate. Perhaps, then, the most useful response to alarming reproductive statistics is not immediate certainty, but better questions: What exactly do the data show? What do they not show? Who is being represented? Who gets to speak? And whose reproductive behaviour becomes a matter of public concern?

These questions matter because statistics do more than describe populations. Once they enter media, policy and professional discourse, they help shape how populations are understood, which behaviours become visible as social problems and whose bodies become subjects of concern. Sometimes the most important story is not what the numbers supposedly reveal. It is what we make the numbers mean.

Diya Paresh Padiyar is a researcher in Gender Studies and English whose work focuses on trans and non-binary healthcare, reproductive justice, migration and health inequalities. Originally from Goa, India, she recently completed an MA at Lancaster University, where her research explored trans and non-binary migrants’ experiences of pregnancy and maternity healthcare in the UK. Her wider interests include inclusive healthcare, queer media, representation and advocacy.

Related Blogs

• 

  Born into Care: 1 in every 118 infants in England at risk of care proceedings in 2024/25

• 

  Social Work Across Borders: Building Global Connections in Kenya

• 

  UK Government apologises for its role in historic forced adoption

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.