A Right to The Body

Recently, in their December 2010 issue, Marie Claire published an article detailing China's infamous Iron Fist Campaign. The article, penned by Abigail Hayworth, brings to the forefront of news China's population and gender-preference issues. The article interviews one Wei Laojin and can be read in full here: Breaking China's One-Child Law. 


China's governmental response to the massive urban sprawl overtaking their country was regulated with the introduction of the One Child Policy in 1978. Because the country is patriarchal, a general preference for sons was also born with the policy; leaving baby girls frequently trashed, suffocated, or intentionally left behind after birth. 


Laojin's situation is a bit different. Already a mother of two (Laojin lived in a section of the country where the One Child Law went unregulated), she was forced into sterilization when the government heard she was pregnant a third time. The Iron Fist Campaign, the government's crackdown of the One Child Policy, made sure to kidnap the relatives of Laojin as a method of bribery; eventually she was forced to submit to sterilization. 


As if Chinese women had not already been born into a society in which they are unwanted, forced sterilization only hits home the point that women are seen as the "problem" in China. It's as if the country has totally neglected the fact that it takes two to tango- women can't breed alone. Thus, women are being punished for fertility, for the organs they bear, and for reproductive ramifications beyond their control. Birth control is not as widely available in China as it is in the US; additionally, women are shamed if the gender of their baby does not turn out to be male. 


Thus, China sees a solution in sterilization. Laojin's experience was impersonal and highly foreign to the health codes the Western world holds high. When Laojin turned herself in to sterilization, her menstrual cycle was upon her. She asked first to return in a week; when officials refused, she begged for a shower, which was also denied to her. Sterilization, a term that should never be applicable to humans, has turned the female vasectomy into a grotesque operation. 

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Over the course of our semester, my Global Feminism class discussed an article by Hortense Spillers, where Spillers advocates that slavery devalues the very physicality of one's body. Though the subject is different, the method is the same: destroy the body until the person inside it no longer assimilates with their very core.