Seminar: Whose Womb is it Anyway? Women’s Liberation, Nation-Building, and the Politics of Abortion in Modern China
16 AUG 2024 – 12pm-1pm
USyd, New Law Building Annex (F10A) Seminar Room 342 Camperdown, NSW 2050
This event is co-hosted with UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture’s Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art and Laureate Centre for History & Population.
Synopsis
At an annual rate of 49 abortions per 1,000 reproductive-aged women, China has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. This presentation situates contemporary Chinese views of abortion within long-running debates about the ethics of abortion, its implications for gender equality, and its value as a tool of social engineering. Moreover, this lecture explains how abortion inadvertently became a primary method of fertility control in China.
Speaker
Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, PhD is Acting Associate Professor of Chinese Humanities at Emory University. Her book, Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), uses interviews and archival research to analyze how ordinary people navigated China’s shifting fertility policies both before and during the One Child Policy era.