Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies

16. The Politics of Making Modern Babies in China: Reproductive Technologies and the “New” Eugenics

298 SIXTEEN The Politics of Making Modern Babies in China Reproductive Technologies and the “New” Eugenics Lisa Handwerker Since the late 1980s, there has been increased interest in and use of new reproductive technologies (NRTs), resulting in a “new” eugenics in the People’s Republic of China. In March 1988 in Beijing, a thirty-nine-yearold woman from rural China gave birth to China’s first test-tube baby. By December 1993, one of China’s major teaching hospitals had produced more than fifty test-tube babies through the combined efforts of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT). In other cases, babies have been conceived with the help of donated eggs, donated embryos, artificial insemination (Chao, 1988), sperm intrafallopian transfer (SIFT), and gamete intrauterine transfer (GIUT). Today in China, major urban hospitals and research institutes are pushing the limits of reproductive technologies to include eugenic-oriented practices of sex selection and human reproductive cloning. In China, a country with an explicit and restrictive birth planning campaign , there is no official policy to foster IVF programs, and high-tech baby making is viewed ambivalently by both professionals and the public. Nonetheless , in this chapter, I argue that the growth of a reproductive technology industry has been unwittingly encouraged through the combined influences of (1) a long-standing cultural imperative for women to become mothers and, ideally, to produce sons; (2) Maoist social ideology and practices ; (3) the one-child birth policy; and (4) post-1980 global market influences . In the context of the birth planning policy, NRT-assisted pregnancies and births have also resulted in a new obligation on the part of educated parents to have a mentally and physically superior baby. A new reproductive standard has been established through NRTs, creating a scenario for a THE POLITICS OF MAKING BABIES IN CHINA 299 eugenics based on medical ideology and practices and a corresponding elitism in China for an improved single child. To illustrate these points, this chapter is divided into three main sections . Following a discussion of research methodology, I first explore Chinese birth control policy. I argue that the intent of the birth policy is quite different from its actual impact on women, especially infertile women. Next I analyze the growth of the reproductive technology industry despite this restrictive birth policy and despite ambivalence about NRTs among professionals and the public. In the last section I show how NRTs and the onechild policy are on a collision course in China, in the form of a “new” eugenics made possible by doctors using these technologies to purportedly produce the “perfect” child. METHODOLOGY This chapter, based on the first comprehensive ethnographic study of infertility and reproductive technologies in modern China, draws on a wide range of anthropological methods and sources (Handwerker, 1990, 1993). For twelve months, in 1990–1991, I observed patient-doctor interactions at three well-established, infertility clinics in Beijing, two based in biomedical hospitals and one based in a traditional Chinese medicine hospital. I also took two brief side trips, including a two-week trip to Hunan Province where I met with both the founder of China’s first sperm bank and the founder of China’s eugenics movement. Using a formal, thirty-eight-page written questionnaire, I, along with a research assistant, interviewed one hundred women, mostly Han Chinese. In Mandarin, we asked open- and closed-ended questions about a variety of subjects, including demographic information, women’s roles, marriage, fertility beliefs (including pregnancy, menstruation, prenatal education, and childbirth), sexuality, gynecological disorders, infertility, and medical treatments for infertility, including NRTs. In addition, I interviewed approximately fifty other women and five men, asking open-ended questions about family relations, marriage, the birth policy, children, sex preference, sexuality, and infertility and its treatment, including NRTs, adoption, and eugenics. I also interviewed physicians, including seven family planning experts, two representatives from international family planning agencies, seven infertility specialists, the team of doctors who produced China’s first test-tube baby, and the founder of China’s first sperm bank, as noted above. At the request of one IVF director, I also designed a brief structured questionnaire on attitudes toward egg and sperm donation, which I administered to twenty-three women in her clinic. 300 GLOBALIZING TECHNOLOGIES Since I had arrived in China six months after the Tiananmen Square massacre and was not sure whether I would face fieldwork restrictions, I complemented...