A Painful Legacy: Experiencing an IUD Removal in Post-One-Child China

In the bodies of many aging Chinese women, the intrauterine device (IUD) remains as a silent material legacy of the one-child policy, becoming painfully embedded and rusted over decades of state-mandated use. This research will focus on aging women in Foshan, South China, whose bodies were painfully caught between local patrilineal expectations and the contraceptive mandates of the one-child era (1979 - 2015). It will investigate how IUDs have reshaped, entangled, and haunted women’s bodies within China’s shifting reproductive landscape over the past five decades. Following the policy’s abolition in 2016 within a pronatalist climate, aging women and their younger daughters in Foshan engage in handling the afterlives of these birth control technologies. This research will consider IUD removal as a complex practice connected to broader pain and care. Through three months of ethnographic research, I seek to answer: How do women across generations in Foshan understand and experience the bodily legacy of reproductive policies and its prolonged pain within the socio-political transformation? This project aims to document the pain experience of IUD removal in post-one-child China, and inquire into how mother-daughter care is practiced to navigate gendered suffering and lived moralities in everyday life. The analysis of IUD removal will contribute to anthropological conversations on pain, social suffering, and intergenerational care in the historical process of state reproductive governance.