Compulsory Motherhood Challenged and Remade in the Name of Choice: Framing the Right to Choose Under Old and New Maternalism

Abstract

The right to choose is a popular but contested framing of women's reproductive autonomy. Through an investigation of the dynamic between population policy and maternalism in Taiwan, this chapter reveals how the choice rhetoric empowered challenges to compulsory motherhood under the authoritarian government's antinatalist policy and how it has been used both to challenge and to enforce pronatalist policy under liberal democracy. It is argued that compulsory motherhood not only has been challenged but also remade and that a break from "choice" is needed to better respond to the rise of a new maternalism which reinforces women's ideal role as mothers.