Questions of Conscience

Abstract

This chapter explores the social relations of authority, obligation, and love out of which women's reproductive decisions were forged when a fetus was defined as abnormal. The chapter highlights how women in Hanoi found their bearings in this disorienting situation by listening to the opinions of others, drawing health care professionals and family members into the decisions that they had to make. The chapter also attends to the feelings of remorse that the women expressed after having their pregnancies terminated. Despite their conviction that they had come to the right decision, all the women felt troubled by questions of conscience. To account for these ambivalent emotions, the chapter argues, the fetus as a moral agent must be taken into consideration. After its death, the fetal spirit still hovered, threatening to keep haunting its parents. The chapter describes how this compelled the relatives of the prospective parents to take a range of ritual precautions, seeking to exorcise the spirit from the family body. People's fears of ghostly fetal returns can, the chapter concludes, be seen as moral commentaries on impossibly hard reproductive choices.