Sarah Mellors Rodriguez's timely book reveals the variegated textures of fertility control over the longue durée through the voices of ordinary men and women. Archival work and oral histories conducted in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Luoyang, three cities of vastly different character, show the local implementation of birth control policy to be highly uneven and the Chinese central government's control over reproduction more tenuous than expected. Along with Ruby Lai's Premarital Abortion in China (2023), this work focuses on the grass roots in a departure from previous literature on fertility control in China, which has largely centered on the one-child policy and the roles of elite actors who shaped it. It also offers a new periodization that begins with the dawn of China's Republican era and locates birth planning in the global conversations of the early twentieth century, when new concepts of “population” linked individual bodies to a national body politic....
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