Scissors, Surveys, And Psycho‐Prophylactics: Prenatal Health Care Campaigns And State Building In China, 1949–1954

Abstract

This paper examines how the Chinese state's prenatal health care campaigns of the early 1950s attempted to redefine women's social and political roles. The replacement of local midwifing practices with a uniform birthing method in order to radically reduce infant and mother mortality entailed complex ramifications regarding the relationship of women vis-à-vis the state. Campaigns involved demonizing "traditional" midwifing, promoting a stastical vision of female reproductivity and children as national resources, and the isolation of individual mothers as directly responsible to the state for managing reproduction for the national interest. In sum, a physiological definition of gender was used to open women's bodies to state management. Utopic visions of painless childbirth and of the socialist nation as a giant new family were used to promote participation in grassroots campaigns, but the sources also point to forms of local resistance to the micro-level reorganization of power these campaigns intended.

The Rise in Cesarean Births and the Technocratic Medicalization of Childbirth in Late-Reform China

“…In the urban areas, a growing number of women gave birth in hospitals under the guidance of a new generation of professionally trained midwives. In the rural areas, most women continued to give birth at home, but there emerged a new type of government-certified local midwife who was required to complete a short-term course on modern socialist techniques of childbirth care-the so-called "new birth methods" 新法接生-with a primary focus on disinfection, among other concerns (Croll, 1978: 245-46;Fang, 2017;Goldstein, 1998;Hershatter, 2011;Johnson and Wu, 2014). Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the state recognized the necessity of home birth for women who did not have convenient access to medical facilities and acknowledged the role of community-based midwives (see Ministry of Health, 1989;Gov.cn, 2005Gov.cn, [1995).…”

Yang Chongrui and the First National Midwifery School: Childbirth Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China

“…Th e practices discussed here took place within and around Beijing and cannot be said to be representative of China as a whole, or even necessarily indicative of birth practices throughout Beijing. SeeGoldstein 1998. Downloaded from Brill.com09/22/2020 04:20:00PM via free access…”