UCLA

The thesis examines how birth control was practiced, represented, and morally judged in Ming-Qing China through legal, literary, and medical sources. Here, I define birth control as practices engaged in by women, couples, or families encompassing everything from contraceptive methods to abortion and infanticide. Because the state discouraged birth control, the archival record is marked by silence: medical handbooks did not record many effective and safe contraceptive or abortifacient formulae; legal cases frame abortion as evidence of illicit sex; and literary works picture birth control as dangerous moral transgression. However, by reading against the grain, it reviews that people across social classes employed a wide range of methods to manage fertility under economic or emotional pressures.The thesis argues that women’s autonomy in reproductive decision-making did not always align with better outcomes. When birth control was a collective family decision, women had access to safer options, such as bringing in concubines or seeking professional physicians. In contrast, when birth control was a woman’s individual decision, especially in contexts of adultery, her limited access to reliable medical help often produced severe consequences. The study demonstrates that birth control was an open secret in Late Imperial China, and the history of reproductive decision-making thus offers a window into women’s constrained bodily autonomy. The thesis concludes by tracing how these dynamics persisted into the twentieth century, as the criminalization of abortion (1910-1935) and later PRC birth planning policies continued to situate women’s bodies as the center of reproductive governance.