Restricted Choices in Reproduction and Contraception: Chinese Women’s Perceptions of Reproductive Autonomy and Rights Under the One-Child Policy

This study explores Chinese women’s perceptions and practices of autonomous decision-making regarding intrauterine device (IUD) use and childbirth during the one-child policy era. To amplify women's voice and respect their personal experiences, Utilizing the feminist life history approach, I conducted four semi-structured interviews with my female relatives, and analyzed their deployments and choices of words through feminist critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal the complex interplay between state power, Confucian cultural norms, and individual agency. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and governmentality, the research explores how state employsand exercises biopower across social, institutional, and economic sectors, establishing a systematic mechanism to monitor and control women’s sexuality, ensuring them to become “docile bodies”. Besides, it also contextualizes women's rhetoric under the prolonged Confucian cultural norms and family structures, through which the paper unmasks how the oppressive and uequal social-cultural environment further restricts women’s reproductive autonomy by promoting a myth of female-exclusive fertility responsibility. The study concludes that while Chinese women’s reproductive rights are constrained by a patriarchal political-cultural nexus, they also exhibit agency in challenging these constraints. Finally, inspired by Judith Bulter's discussion over body and autonomy, this research challenges the applicability of Western liberal frameworks of reproductive autonomy in the Chinese context, advocating for a re-imagined understanding that better reflects non-Western socio-cultural realities, thereby contributing to global discussions on reproductive rights with culturally contextualized perspectives.