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A Review of: “Jing-Bao Nie. Behind the Silence: Chinese Voices on Abortion”

When one thinks of the abortion debate in bioethics, one thinks of the hoary old standoff between the sanctity of the life of the child and the rights of the woman over her own body. Jing-Bao Nie’s work situates the woman at the center of what is often a heart-rending situation involving loss and grief for what might have been, a juncture in life at which, amid the maelstrom of community and cultural expectations and perceptions, no good options present themselves. That his documentation of this human drama takes place in the context of Chinese thought only serves to make his treatment of the topic and report of his extensive ethnographic research all the more challenging. One does not here find it at all easy to slip into Western stereotypes; instead, one is compelled to look at the stories against the backdrop of a society that is taking seriously the fact that they number one billion people. Nie’s evident concern for the problem and for the struggles of his people of origin in attempting to cope with a set of cultural values deeply rooted in conceptions of lineage, family, and relatedness to one another shines through what he writes. In the process of exploring this multifaceted human phenomenon and the range of opinions and attitudes to which it gives rise, Nie also destroys the myth that a Chinese person is one of one billion nameless faces whose life choices can be adequately represented in abstracto rather than in actualitas. The staggering complexity of our being as members of the global human village with its varying contexts of life, strikes one forcefully as one contemplates the quintessentially Chinese paradox of humanity en masse and the individual lives and life stories that contribute to that overwhelming reality. This is a book full of real people struggling within constraints that touch them as individuals, but that also engage them in conceptions of the common good and of their place in the scheme of things. To grasp that overarching theme is to lift ethics from the narrow and procedural terms that are often dictated by individualistic conceptions of autonomy and rights and to remind us that our lives are articulated against a wider canvas than the one we often encounter. The book introduces us to a strange and almost visionary world created by Taoism, Chinese communism, historical reality, peasant life, Westernization, and urbanization. It traces a trajectory through the byways of living, loving, working, sexuality, and healthcare in the late twentieth century. It does not subtend simplistic moral stances of the goodness or badness of actions or even policies, although the inhumanity of coercive and rationally driven policy responses to contested areas of human life is insistently communicated. Despite this message, we are led towards the idea that we do have collective responsibilities, which it would be morally derelict to forget in the face of individual preferences. If I have a criticism of the book it is that some of its key messages are expressed almost surreptitiously: “Confucianism opposes taking economic and material development as the most important goal of the society and calls for establishing a people-centred governance or state, a polity of humanity (renzhang), a harmonious and righteous society” (Nie 2006, 215). The self effacing style is, however, an enduring and endearing characteristic of the author. This book refuses to be simplified or reduced to something it is not. Good for it and all power to the author’s hand. I regard this book less as a piece of bioethics than as an ethically informed glimpse of the reality within which bioethics must find an articulate place that avoids