Reproductive Modernities in Policy: Maternal Mortality, Midwives, and Cesarean Sections in China, 1900s-2000s.

China is one of a few countries to reach the 2015 United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent in fifteen years. The longstanding and intractable problem of maternal mortality in the Global North and South makes China's success all the more remarkable. This article examines relationships between China's reproductive health policies aimed at reducing maternal mortality and technological changes in managing childbirth associated with them from the early twentieth century to the present day.

Rethinking Reproductive Technologies and Modernities in Time and Space.

This overview proposes new ways of interrogating assumptions about globally circulating reproductive technologies and modernities. Comparing and contrasting East Asian experiences of childbirth medicalization provides an alternative to Western-centric discourses and models that tend to focus on notions of individual choice. This special section draws on Chinese and Japanese materials from the twentieth century forward to document how the medicalization of childbirth and use of technology alongside shifting moral ideals and public health policies work to co-produce globalized frameworks of distinctly East Asian modernities.

Maternal bodies, breast-feeding, and consumer desire in urban China.

Urban Chinese women in the 1990s formulated their infant-feeding decisions in the context of a society undergoing radical transformation as the nation moved from a centrally planned socialist economy to a global, market-oriented one. Narratives of new mothers in Beijing in the 1990s provide insights into the multiple forces that shaped their infant-feeding practices. These personal histories also illustrate the limitations of multilateral breast-feeding programs that emphasize breast-feeding as a natural interaction between mother and infant.