Watch “Nation-Building & Birth Control in Modern China” by TIR

@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG Birth control practices in modern China is real-life handmaid’s tale.  See THIS IS REVOLUTION podcast @TIRShowOakland by @probert06 & @LaFinAbsolute w/@s_mellors.  Watch Thursdays, 8 pm ET, 1/13 – 4/7/22, “If America Fails?:  The Coming Tyranny.”

This was an intriguing conversation, from the perspective of how reproduction is managed in The Handmaid’s Tale.  Practices of enslavers included controlling the reproductive capacities of Black women in the early history of the U.S.  In our modern-day, access to birth control and abortions, as well as forced sterilizations and prenatal care/infant mortality rates, reveal the hand of the state in efforts to control when and how often women give birth.  So the control of women’s bodies depicted in the fictional Handmaid’s Tale may look outrageously extreme, but actual practices show the real capacity of state and economic power to exert control over the timing and frequency of childbirth.  For examples of what this looks like on the other side of the world, the linked episode of THIS IS REVOLUTION considers birth control in modern China and its intersection with the desires of the state.  — LMO

“In 1982 China’s population crossed the one-billion-mark, only three years after the promulgation of its famous, or in some quarters infamous, ‘One Child Policy’, a policy that was only abolished in 2015. That China’s ruling communist party might be concerned with questions of overpopulation in the world’s most populous country seems to make intuitive sense. However, such a perspective is perhaps over simplistic as it obscures the complex history of birth control in modern China.  For instance, upon assuming control of China in 1949, the initial stance of the Communist Party was one that favored high fertility rates. What factors have shaped both the attitudes of the Chinese state and Chinese society towards the issue of birth control? How have policies and attitudes change[d] regarding this issue since the Communist Party assumed power? And what have been the implications for gender relations in the world’s most populous nation? We ask these questions and more, This is Revolution.

“About Dr. Mellors Rodriguez…Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of East Asian History at Missouri State University. Her forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines birth control and abortion in China from the early twentieth century to the present.”  — THIS IS REVOLUTION

WATCH | Birth Control in Modern China: Examining the One Child Policy w/Sarah Mellors Rodriguez | THIS IS REVOLUTION podcast | 10/14/2021