A few years ago an Indian American undergraduate student at the University of Chicago asked me to moderate a film discussion about a documentary on sex-selective abortion in India and China. The screening of the film, It’s a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words, was sponsored by a well-regarded human rights center on campus. Before I agreed to host the film discussion, I wanted to know a little bit about the movie. Through an online search I learned that many women’s groups, including the National Organization for Women, were screening the film across the country. The film was also an official selection for the Amnesty International Film Festival, and it appeared in Ms. review of feminist movies. Given the support it had from feminist organizations, I agreed to moderate the discussion even though my initial Google search did not reveal any background about the people and organizations that made the movie.

      However, when I watched the movie, I was troubled by the narrow story it told about sex selection in India. The movie began with a poor Indian woman from a village pointing to where she buried the infant girls she had killed; it depicted the violent removal of a fetus from the womb as part of a cycle of violence against Indian women; and it ended with an interview with a Caucasian American woman activist who said that she helps women in other countries because they cannot help themselves.

      The characters in this film were exactly the offensive caricatures identified by human rights scholar Makau Mutua nearly two decades ago in his critique of human rights work.¹ In this movie, Indians were savages, female fetuses were victims, and Caucasian American women were saviors. Nonetheless, much like the feminists who lauded the movie across the United States, the largely pro-choice audience for whom I moderated the film discussion did not challenge the film or its message.

      Through a series of interviews with policymakers, advocates, and women who sex-select, the film framed sex-selective abortion as a cycle of violence against girls and women in India. Having spent many summers in India with my grandparents, through the academic and activist work I have done in India over the last decade, and having lived there as a Fulbright scholar, I know firsthand that many women obtain sex-selective abortions because of societal norms that demand a male heir, and not as a result of overt physical or emotional coercion. There is no doubt that some of these women also face domestic violence for their failure to produce a male heir. The film, however, depicted no possibility other than violence.

      Upset by the disconnect between my discomfort with the film and the general acceptance of its message by the people with whom I watched it, that very evening I stayed up late into the night trying to find out information about the filmmakers and the film’s funding sources. The film was expensive to make as it was