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7 It was the moral weight of the decision that burdened Tuyết and Huy. Sitting in the makeshift café outside Hanoi’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, Tuyết folded her arms around her pregnant belly in a protective gesture. “I’m scared,” she said. “I am scared of having to have an abortion. I don’t understand this. Everything seems normal—it has arms and legs, everything looks so fine. There is only this problem with the brain. Having an abortion now would be wrong. But if it is not well, keeping it means suffering. Our child will suffer and I will suffer. We just have to trust the doctors.” A tiny, elderly woman walked by. Heading for the taxis at the other side of the hospital yard, she held a tightly bundled infant in her arms. A young couple followed close behind her, carrying two brightly colored bags. Tuyết fell silent, following the small procession with her eyes. “Here you are,” the café owner said, placing three cups in front of us, Dilmah tea for Tuyết and coffee for Huy and me. Huy heaped several spoonfuls of sugar into his cup. Tuyết did not touch hers. She looked into the distance, her eyes dark. His elbows on his knees, his hands folded under his chin, Huy looked deeply uncomfortable , as if he wanted to be anywhere but here. On this February day in 2004, Tuyết was nearly 29 weeks into her pregnancy. The ultrasound scan she had just undergone had revealed that there were large amounts of fluid on the brain of her fetus. One scanning image showed the face of the fetus. Another depicted the fetal brain seen from above; three large black blots filled nearly the entire Introduction Choice as Belonging 8 | Introduction head. Sitting in the café outside the hospital, Tuyết and her husband, Huy, were scrutinizing the images, pondering how to act on the information they offered. During the ultrasound scan, the physician had told them only that there was water on the brain of their fetus, and that the decision regarding how to act on this information was theirs. Yet as Tuyết and Huy described it to me, this decision was not their own, but one that they must make together with others. “We must talk to the doctors again,” Tuyết said in a low voice. “After all, they are the experts.” “What do you think?” Huy appealed to my colleague Hằng and me. “Have you ever seen a problem like this before?” Sensing the drama of the situation, the café owner—who turned out to live in the same Red River delta village as Tuyết and Huy—sat down at our table, venturing that in her opinion they should have this pregnancy terminated . A child with water on the brain, she claimed, would never be any good. She had seen cases like this before. Tuyết should be grateful that new technology had revealed this problem at an early stage, while something could still be done. Three other women in the café joined the conversation, one advocating for an abortion, another suggesting further examinations at another hospital, and the third offering to contact a physician she knew for advice. In the end, Huy closed the discussion by saying that they would have to return to their village and talk to their elders. This decision, he said, demanded the entire family’s participation . But while emphasizing the collective nature of their plight, Huy also made it clear that, ultimately, the moral responsibility for this decision was his and his wife’s. Looking me in the eye, he said, “This is a question of conscience. No matter what we do, this decision will haunt us forever.” This tension between the moral solitude of the individual and communal lives led in association with others forms a core theme in this book.1 Across the globe, advancing technologies for selective reproduction place increasing numbers of women in situations where they must make excruciating decisions about the outcomes of their pregnancies.2 For anthropology, this development raises thorny questions about risk, knowledge, power, and choice; at issue are moral questions about the meaning and value of particular human lives and political questions regarding how such questions are posed, answered, and acted upon. In what has come to be called “the West,” contemporary health care policies and programs define human reproduction largely as a matter of individual autonomy and...

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