“Stop Our Sisters from Bleeding and Crying!”: An Affective Approach to Premarital Abortion Care in Low-Fertility China

Globally, the right-based approach and the public health approach have been dominant models that advanced the legalization and provision of abortion care. Nevertheless, the applicability of these two models is highly susceptible to the socio-political and economic realities across different societies. This study focuses on China, where human rights advocacy and social movements have been long-repressed, to examine how “affect” and “sisterhood” – deployed by women as a form of homosocial relational resource, has substituted the rights-based discourse and become a discursive, networking, and virtual organizing strategy to achieve reproductive well-being. Data was gathered between 2013 and 2019 through ethnographic observations in multiple facilities and in-depth interviews with women who had had abortion and medical workers in China and content analysis of materials collected from an online forum. The findings illustrate the role of non-kin sisterly ties in three contexts: medical facility, peer groups, and online platforms. The women proactively cultivated occasional and enduring homosocial relationships to cope with the risks brought by an unintended pregnancy and navigate individual and structural constraints. These embodied intimate bonds facilitated access to timely and woman-centered reproductive healthcare and enabled the women to regulate emotions, manage stigma, and contest hegemonic prejudices. Nevertheless, this female homosocial solidarity appeared to be apolitical, which hardly produced critical reflection on the biopolitical governance of the state that continued to undermine women’s reproductive autonomy. This article sheds lights on an affective approach in actualizing reproductive agency amid the pronatalist turn of China’s population policy.