ABSTRACT
In this chapter, author reports the results of his efforts to be an attentive feminist listener. As part of a larger study on attitudes about abortion in contemporary mainland China, author conducted semistructured interviews with thirty mainland Chinese women who had abortions. What follows is a detailed summary of five of these interviews, some general points about all thirty of them, and the results of several surveys he conducted on abortion while author was in mainland China. Yingying had an abortion because she and her boyfriend believed they were not ready for a child. She said that among her many college classmates no one had yet had a child. Particularly sensitive to pain in a society in which women generally report having a hard time bearing even small discomforts, Jinglian described her two abortions as exceptionally painful. Chinese women's feet have been liberated, and the Confucian ideology of the "three obediences and four virtues" has been seriously criticized.
