Postdoctoral Fellow, Graduate Institute of Science, Technology and Society, National Yang-Ming University.
Med Anthropol Q. 2014 Sep;28(3):399-418. doi: 10.1111/maq.12103. Epub 2014 Jun 13.
Women's pursuit of medical interventions in childbirth has been a challenging issue in feminist and medical anthropological research on the medicalization of reproduction. This article addresses the gender politics surrounding maternal requests for cesarean sections in Taiwan. Since the 1990s, Taiwanese cesarean rates have been reported as among the highest in the world. That is not the case now, yet they are still perceived as such, and the current rate of 37% is indeed high by any standards. The government and public discourses attribute the high cesarean rate to women's demand for this intervention. However, my ethnographic research indicates that the Taiwanese hospital birthing system leads to the prevalence of cesareans, and that women's requests for them constitute strategic responses to the system and its existing high cesarean rates. Using women's attempt to avoid "suffering twice" as an example, I argue that maternal requests for cesareans often lie at the intersection between their restricted control over childbirth and their agency within the medical system.
女性在分娩过程中对医疗干预的追求一直是生育医学化方面女权主义和医学人类学研究中的一个具有挑战性的问题。本文探讨了围绕着台湾产妇要求剖腹产这一问题的性别政治。自 20 世纪 90 年代以来，台湾的剖腹产率一直被报告为世界上最高的之一。但现在情况并非如此，尽管如此，人们仍认为如此，而目前 37%的剖腹产率按任何标准来说确实都很高。政府和公众话语将高剖腹产率归因于女性对这种干预的需求。然而，我的民族志研究表明，台湾的医院分娩系统导致了剖腹产的流行，而女性对剖腹产的要求则是对该系统及其现有高剖腹产率的策略性回应。本文以女性试图避免“两次受苦”为例，认为产妇要求剖腹产往往处于她们对分娩的控制受限和她们在医疗系统中的代理权之间的交叉点。
