BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

“health-for-all” World Health Organization initiative. 610 The modernization of childbirth in
China is widespread in urban areas, but China’s poorest regions still do not have affordable
maternal health care. Only in 2004, Qinghai province began a pilot program to provide low-cost
or free maternal health services for its impoverished herder women. 611 There have been
significant advances, but still the mortality rates are relatively high, especially in impoverished
regions.
Today, few jieshengpo exist in China. They are in many cases associated with back-alley
practices of dealing with unwanted pregnancies. But these old-style midwives are not the same
as they were around the turn of the last millennium: they use relatively aseptic techniques to
deliver babies at home. They are still vilified, however, as unsanitary and superstitious. In 2002,
Ministry of Public Health Official Fu Wei attributed China’s high maternal mortality rate to
midwifery malpractice. 612 China’s 1995 Law on Maternal and Infant Health Care allocated more
money to build rural health care facilities across China. As more and more clinics are
established in rural areas, jieshengpo are being displaced by modern trained zhuchanshi.
According to a 2004 People’s Daily article, 76 percent of all Chinese women deliver babies in
hospitals or clinics, which leaves little room for untrained midwives to practice. 613
However, as in Western countries, modern childbirth can make women feel helpless,
uncomfortable, and degraded because of largely unnecessary routine procedures. 614 According
to a 2001 study, hospital births in four Shanghai hospitals (including one outlying rural county
hospital) were highly medicalized, with women receiving routine episiotomies, rectal
610
“China Vows Health Care for 900 Million.”
611
"Low-Cost Midwifery Offered to Qinghai Women," China Daily Online, November 2, 2004.
612
"Midwifery Phased out in China's Rural Areas."
613
Ibid.
614
Qian et.al, “Evidence-based Obstetrics;” Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years
of the Experts' Advice to Women. New York: Doubleday, 1978; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as
Experience and Institution. New York: Bantam Books, 1977.
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