Title
The Politics of Abortion in Modern China
Abstract
In the early 1950s, abortion was punishable by law in China. How then did China come to have one of the world’s highest abortion rates?
Drawing on the grassroots history of birth control and abortion, Dr. Sarah Mellors Rodriguez (Missouri State University) explained how abortion inadvertently became a primary method of fertility control in China. She demonstrated how state agendas and cultural conceptions of gender shaped the trajectory of abortion from criminal offense to a primary method of birth control in modern Chinese society.
In addition to her public lecture on the history of modern abortion in China, she also met with a Chinese history class to discuss her current research.
Biography
Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is Associate Professor of History at Missouri State 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 women and men navigated China’s shifting fertility policies both before and during the One Child Policy era.