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The deep interconnections between biology, population politics, and ethics have been strongly brought to the fore by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As the most populous countries in the world, India and China have come to mark our collective conscience in significant ways (Eklund and Purewal [6]; Kaur [13]). Resulting familial, kinship, and policy shifts are paramount in the ways in which China and India are approaching reproductive technologies and demographic transformation. The papers presented in this special issue emerged from a conference on 'Reproduction, Demography and Cultural Anxieties in India and China in the 21 SP st sp Century' held at New Delhi, India, in February 2020. [Extracted from the article]

This paper reflects on the social consequences of biotechnological control of population for values and ethics of care within the family household in rural north India. Based on long-term ethnographic research, it illustrates the manner in which social practices intermingle with reproductive choices and new reproductive technologies, leading to a systematic elimination of female foetuses, and thus, imbalanced sex ratios. This technological fashioning of populations, the paper argues, has far-reaching consequences for the institutions of family, marriage and kinship in north India particularly in relation to care circulation within the family-household leading to a shifting local ethics of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]