Abortion, Sin and the State in Thailand by Whittaker Andrea;

Author:Whittaker, Andrea; [ANDREA WHITTAKER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Ominous music drums marches through the credits, as more blurred dark images of the raided clinic flicker in rapid succession.

(The television programme: Tam la ha khwamjing, Channel 5, 1 July 2001)

Television shows, such as this ‘investigative’ real-life current affairs show, reinforce the common representation of abortion as a problem of young promiscuous unmarried women. Such depictions silence the realities of abortion in Thailand, where the majority of women who present with complications from abortion are married rural women who have completed their child-rearing (Koetsawang 1993) but such women rarely ever figure in public discourse about abortion.1

In this chapter I explore in more detail the representations of ‘women who abort’ in Thai public discourse. Such representations reveal much about the cultural construction of women, motherhood and gender relations in Thailand. I argue that three main tropes are used to depict ‘women who abort’ in Thailand – spoiled girls, desperate women or victims of men. Although here I depict these as separate tropes, in practice, as will be seen in this chapter, they overlap and work in combination. As a form of disciplinary ‘bio power’, such discourses produce and position ‘women’ and ‘men’ in certain ways in the debate, normalising certain attributes, defining certain categories of people and mandating how abortion is viewed as a ‘social problem’ requiring management. As I noted in the previous chapter, the contradictory characterisations of women and abortion represent a broader social renegotiation and ambivalence in the meaning of female gender (Ginsburg 1987, 1990).

The first part of this chapter will look at representations of youth sexuality. I am curious as to why representations of ‘women who abort’ in public discourse such as the investigative news show described earlier, invariably focus upon young women. Usually these women are characterised as morally corrupt girls who challenge conservative values regarding appropriate behaviours for women. At the same time, a contradictory discourse describes women as the victims of predatory males. A final category of women is that of ‘desperate’women, who do not challenge the cherished values of nurturance and motherhood, but seek to change public sentiment in support of narrow reforms of the abortion law. I look at two special categories of ‘desperate’ women who have figured in the abortion debate – women with HIV/AIDS and women with mental illness. I argue that all three characterisations of women fail to represent the experiences and motivations of the majority of women who abort in Thailand, who are allowed no discursive space for their claims to access to abortion.

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