Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Celine Coderey, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In December 2013, Dr Liu Liangpo from the Institute of Urban Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued the following warning: “Polluted water, unsafe food, bad air… so many things are threatening the reproductive capacity of Chinese people. If the situation gets worse, China’s birth-control policy would become redundant.” And while there are numerous other factors behind China’s falling fertility rate (especially reproductive deferral), two years later, the Chinese Communist Party did indeed announce that it was relaxing its family planning policies to allow all couples the possibility of having a second child. And while it is early days, the first indications are that far from all families are keen to take up the possibility to enlarge their families as 630,000 less babies were born in 2017 compared to 2016. In this talk, I explore how fertility clinics are poised to replace abortion clinics as one of the most important family planning institutions in China. After 40 years of comprehensive efforts to prevent birth, China now needs babies, urgently. As a consequence, family planning authorities are now grappling with the many unintended consequences of their ‘one-child policy’: skewed sex ratios, apparently rising infertility rates and now a ‘low fertility culture’. Are we about to witness a reconfiguration of China’s restrictive reproductive complex from family planning to family making? If so, what form might a new reproductive complex take in coming decades?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ayo Wahlberg is Professor MSO at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Working broadly within the field of social studies of medicine, his research has focused on traditional herbal medicine (in Vietnam and the United Kingdom), selective reproductive technologies (in China and Denmark) as well as health metrics (in clinical trials and global health). He is the author of Good Quality – The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China and co-editor of Southern Medicine for Southern People – Vietnamese Medicine in the Making. He recently received funding from the European Research Council for a 5-year (2015-2020) project entitled “The Vitality of Disease – Quality of Life in the Making”.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.