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164 chapter 6 Beyond Knowledge Everyday Encounters with Disability mây: “i saw before me the image of my friend’s child” On October 27, 2004, my colleague Toàn received a phone call. In a soft voice, the woman on the other end introduced herself as Mây. The day before, she told Toàn, a 3D scan performed by Dr. Tuấn had found that her fetus was not developing normally. She read his conclusion aloud to Toàn. Then she asked, “Can you tell me, If I keep this fetus, what will my child be like?” Three weeks later, on November 18, Hiê .p and I went to Hanoi’s Thanh Xuân district where Mây lived with her husband. When we reached their apartment, Mây was waiting for us on the porch outside, wearing a thick brown knitted hat. The porch was full of potted flowers and a little yellow canary was twittering in its cage. Given that she had just undergone a second-trimester abortion, I thought, Mây looked well; she was beautiful and bright-eyed and her cheeks rosy. Inside, we sat down on the straw mat on the living room floor, and Mây immediately blurted out: “I so much wanted to keep this child. I think it was wrong (tội) to give it up. But my husband and many other people encouraged me to have an abortion, so I did.” These words seemed to capture the essence of what she wanted to talk to us about that day: her desire to have a child and the forces that had compelled her to terminate her pregnancy . On Sunday, October 24, Mây told us, she had obtained a 3D ultrasound scan at a private ob-gyn clinic near her home. The doctor Beyond Knowledge | 165 told her that her fetus was soaked with water and that she would have to have an abortion. She and her husband then went to Hanoi’s obstetrics hospital for another 3D scan. “They concluded that the fetus suffered from hydrops (ba .ch ma .ch). They said that with this condition, there was no way that I could keep our child. . . . Neither my husband nor I have much expert knowledge about issues like this. So we listened to what the doctors said and followed their advice. We discussed it a lot, but in the end we decided to give it up.” At first, Mây said, she had insisted on keeping her pregnancy. “I’m not giving up this child,” she had told her husband. “I have carried this child in my womb and I will not give it up.” But her husband persuaded her that an abortion was the best solution. “This is my child too,” he said, “and I too do not want this to happen. But we must listen to the doctors. What else can we do?” Like most other couples receiving an adverse diagnosis, Mây and her husband claimed that in making their decision, they followed advice given by health professionals. Mây’s resort to an abortion could therefore be interpreted as a mode of self-making in which she, by submitting to expert biomedical knowledge, took up the position of a modern citizensubject , aligning herself with dominant truths and forms of authority. Women’s stories indicated, however, that the expert advice they received achieved its moral force and social significance from concrete everyday experience rather than by virtue of embodying abstract authority. In Mây’s case, the experiences of her friend Xuân Anh played a decisive role in shaping the decision that she came to. “I have a friend,” Mây said. Her name is Xuân Anh. She was born in 1978 like me. Her son was born with brain damage. He died recently, at the age of four. He spent his entire life lying in one place (nằm một chô ˜). He could not do anything at all. The doctors said that if I gave birth, there would be something wrong with the brain of my child. When I heard that, I saw before me the image of my friend’s child and I felt scared. What would I do if my child were like that too? I felt that it was better to set it free. I decided to give it up. I would feel so sorry for my child. This child would have had a life of suffering. . . . Whenever I...

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