For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm.

Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions.

Abstract

While abortion is legal in China, the individual right to abortion is legally and politically ambiguous. The Chinese government has repeatedly emphasised the goal of reducing the number of non-medically necessary abortions. While this goal was first formulated to address sex-selective abortions, under China’s pronatalist era, this goal has taken on new meanings with implications for the surveillance and control of women’s bodies. 

The purpose of this paper is to trace how technologies of power operate within what I argue is a burgeoning anti-choice agenda, by asking how institutions, norms and practices shape women’s access to abortion. Four technologies of power are identified: 1) evoking men’s reproductive rights, 2) imposing administrative and temporal constraints on abortion services, 3) strengthening “early pregnancy” care, “fertility friendly” care and persuasive counselling, and 4) abortion stigmatising propaganda. 

While these technologies of power are deployed by various actors, ranging from the family, local hospitals and governments, and private advocates for family welfare, not all are endorsed by the state. Yet, they align with the state’s goals of reducing the number of abortions. In combination with the state’s pronatalist ambition of increasing birth rates, these goals provide normative and moral rationales fuelling an anti-choice agenda. Limited state-provided legal support and remedy for abortion-seeking women whose abortion access is compromised, and few state sanctions of abortion-restricting practices emerge as additional technologies of power. Together, they become part of the biopolitics of rejuvenating the Chinese nation with withering regard for women’s reproductive rights.