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Public responses often cast sex selection as self-evidently ignorant, cruel, and misogynistic \u2013 an obvious evil meriting denunciation and eradication. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Gujarat state, this article zooms out from ultrasound and abortion to survey the landscape of biomedical, herbal, and religious son production techniques surrounding them. Doing so clarifies the lived moral experience in which sex selection is embedded. Resort to multiple son production techniques is both an abstract <jats:italic>moral indicator<\/jats:italic> reflecting prevailing concerns and a pragmatic <jats:italic>moral intervention<\/jats:italic> aimed at harnessing every available means in response to those concerns. Fundamentally, people live out the multimodal quest that sometimes leads to selective abortion as aspiration \u2013 social, bodily, spiritual \u2013 toward an indispensable good, not as heartless rejection of daughters. Pluralistic son production illuminates the moral uses of medical pluralism for care-seekers, social scientists, and policymakers and practitioners. The case underscores that \u201ccomplementary\u201d therapies, rather than being just desperate behaviors, barriers to biomedical therapy, or curiosities to be integrated into care, may in fact be the clearest markers of the moral conditions in which public health problems unfold.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s11013-024-09880-6","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,9,25]],"date-time":"2024-09-25T21:04:40Z","timestamp":1727298280000},"page":"256-280","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Striving Against Sonlessness: The Moral Uses of Medical Pluralism in Western Indian Quests for a Boy"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"49","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0002-7054-7864","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Utpal","family":"Sandesara","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,9,25]]},"reference":[{"issue":"9","key":"9880_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"411","DOI":"10.1023\/A:1016859622724","volume":"19","author":"GN Allahbadia","year":"2002","unstructured":"Allahbadia, G. 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