Date: Friday, August 16, 2024
Time: 12 – 1pm AEST
Location: New Law Building Annex (F10A) Seminar Room 342 Camperdown, NSW 2050
Sydney China Seminars
Whose Womb is It Anyway?: Women’s Liberation, Nation-Building, and the Politics of Abortion in Modern China
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.
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.
About the 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.
