Taiwanese Women’S Situatedness of Being Either Single, Childless or Pregnant in Advanced Maternal Age

This three years’project attempts to explore Taiwanese women’s transition to single, childless and being pregnant in ‘advanced maternal age’ as part of their life course. Taiwan has recently become one among the ultra-low fertility rate countries, and many scholars have paid attention to Taiwan’s low birth rate issues. Both present president Ying-Wen Tsai and previous president Ying-Jeou Ma took this as a ‘national crisis’, and the government have tried to boost the fertility rate by developing policy aimed at improving conditions for families with children, for example childcare allowance, daycare subsidy, and privately managed public child care centers. However, the statistics and academic literature seem to suggest that the main reason for Taiwan‘s low birth rate is that more and more women are unwilling to get married and consequently don’t have children since having children without being married is rare in Taiwan. Many related studies have, however, pointed out that as extended education and labour participation have increased, individualistic values have become more significant, and the population of single and childless women has gone up. In addition to this, many women do get married, but at a later age than previously. Delayed marriage also brings delayed pregnancy which increases the risk of complicated maternal health issues. While many values from the past still prevail today such as the idea that a woman must be married to have children, the life course of women in the child bearing age may be quite different from that of the mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations. This project aims at exploring how contemporary women experience this, and how they adjust to and engage in this social material practice of different paths of single or childless. The project will also explore their experience of medicalized maternity care. Employing American feminist Donna Haraway’s (1991) 'situated knowledges’, this project will conduct interviews, participant observations in the obstetric consultation and collect women’s drawings to explore women’s situatedness and experience of being single, childless and pregnant in advanced maternal age. In the end, this project will contribute to science, technology and society, feminist studies and social science studies by bringing the discussion of Taiwanese women’s experience of, and situatedness in, this transitional path of marriage and childbearing. It is the aim that the result of this study can serve as reference to related policy for marriage and childbirth.