Counting One's Way onto the Global Stage: Enumeration, Accountability, and Reproductive Success in Vietnam

Abstract

This article concerns the ways in which the enumeration of in vitro fertilization (IVF) births emerges as a practice that is simultaneously associated with a socialist nationalist project and post-Ðổi mới market reform. It explores the brief history of and changes in the ways in which recently introduced assisted reproductive technologies and IVF births come to be enumerated by state authorities and by female infertility patients. Focusing on changes in infertility treatment, the article suggests that in the process of making sense of the rapid social, economic, and political changes that have occurred in Vietnam over the past twenty-five years, individuals and institutions continue to draw on socialist orientations as they encounter market changes, leading to practices and subjectivities that are neither clearly socialist nor neoliberal. Rather, they are at once partial and incomplete, yet dynamic, temporally contingent on understandings of experienced pasts, and new opportunities of the current moment.