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134 SEVEN Conceiving the Happy Family Infertility and Marital Politics in Northern Vietnam Melissa J. Pashigian Infertility in northern Vietnam is a serious issue because it threatens to hinder the development of ties that are believed to bind the conjugal unit, to link that unit to the previous generation, and to connect the living to the dead. Childlessness in a married couple challenges the very purpose of marriage in northern Vietnam, where the birth of children is intended to build the nuclear family unit, to fulfill extended-family expectations for filial piety, and to ensure the happiness and security that come with assuming well-established and well-recognized reproductive and gender roles. In this chapter I argue that to understand why women in Vietnam pursue often lengthy and arduous treatments for infertility, it is critical to make sense of how reproduction informs Vietnam-specific conjugal and generational relationships and the potential consequences for the marital relationship when children are not forthcoming. Also important to understanding the experience of infertility are women’s expectations of how having children will change their daily lives and the affective content of their marriages. Indeed, a woman’s efforts to find a solution to infertility are to a large degree shaped by her desire to form a special bond with her husband and his family. Preoccupation with infertility, especially by childless married women who are having difficulty conceiving, often involves fears regarding the consequences for married life that are tied to issues of ancestor worship, descent, and familial expectations. Beyond the family, childbearing and motherhood are celebrated in public culture in northern Vietnam through state media promotion of family planning. The presence of these public national images also shapes the experience of infertility by depicting an idealized version of the Vietnamese family; normative family values that valorize motherhood contrast sharply with the image of the childless couple. INFERTILITY IN NORTHERN VIETNAM 135 In contemporary Vietnam, most women marry at some point during their lives. Approximately 88 percent of women ages twenty-five to fortynine have ever been married (VNICDS, 1995). Just as it is not socially acceptable for Vietnamese women to remain single voluntarily (Belanger & Khuat, 1999), it is also not socially acceptable for married women of reproductive age to remain childless voluntarily. In the 1994 Viet Nam Intercensal Demographic Survey, no recently married women (married less than five years) indicated that they did not wish to have any children at all (VNICDS, 1995). Most women said they preferred two children, which is not surprising as the national family planning program promotes having no more than “one or two” children. Northern Vietnam has had a population control agenda since 1961 (Decision 216-CP) (Uy Ban Quoc Gia Dan So va Ke Hoach Hoa Gia Dinh, 1996). After reunification in 1975, the Vietnamese government expanded its population planning efforts to include southern Vietnam. The family planning program was poorly funded during this period, and into the 1980s the intrauterine device (IUD) was promoted to the exclusion of other methods, including condoms and sterilization (Banister, 1993). Abortions were also available. In the late 1980s the formalization of the national family planning program and the introduction of a one-or-twochild policy followed in the wake of the Doi Moi (Renovation) economic reform policy of 1986, which initiated the shift from a centrally planned economy to a market economy in an effort to bring prosperity to Vietnam. An influx of foreign aid, some of which was earmarked for population control, has made sufficient resources available to widely communicate and enforce a family planning policy in the 1990s and beyond. Family planning efforts are focused on stabilizing a population with tremendous growth potential: more than 55 percent of Vietnam’s population is under the age of twenty-five (VNICDS, 1997). But despite the national emphasis on reducing population growth aimed to benefit the nation, for women in northern Vietnam, not having any children is perhaps, on a personal level, cause for greater concern than having too many children. Although it should seem obvious in the analysis of reproduction that infertility is inextricably linked to fertility (Inhorn, 1994), this dialectical relationship is often overlooked , especially in the greater politics of population and family planning. Reproduction thus serves as a site through which social life and the production and replication of culture can be examined. Reproduction provides a means for exposing contestations of social, political, and moral ideology, as well as cultural transformations. In the...

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