Instrumentalized Bodies, Moralized Pregnancy : A Feminist Bioethical Comparison of China and the United States

This paper compares reproductive governance in China and the United States from a feminist bioethical perspective, drawing on theories of relational autonomy and reproductive justice. In China, whether restricting or encouraging births, the state treats women's reproductive capacity as a demographic resource and restructures family relationships into channels of policy enforcement, eroding the relational foundations of women's autonomy. In restrictive American states after the Dobbs decision, a particular moral position on foetal life is encoded into law, overriding medical judgment and isolating women from supportive relationships through legal threat. Despite different political systems and justifications, both contexts produce a shared outcome: women are depersonalized, treated as instruments of policy or symbols in moral conflicts rather than as persons in their own right. This comparison reveals that patriarchal control over reproduction adapts across different regimes. The paper concludes by proposing "reproductive enablement" as a normative framework, arguing that states should support the relational and material conditions necessary for genuine reproductive self-determination.