I thank the reviewers for their lengthy assessment of my book. Their concluding comment was particularly generous: “Rodriguez has tackled a complex and politically and ethically challenging set of issues. She is to be commended for her contributions to understanding critical issues of reproduction and contraception.”
While I appreciated the reviewers’ close reading of certain parts of my work, I found some aspects of the review to be puzzling. Most critically, the review’s subtitle (“How Should We Tell The Story of the One-Child Policy?”) and the vast majority of the review (9 of 10 pages) focus on the One-Child Policy, a point that is surprising given that only one of the book’s six chapters (eight including the introduction and epilogue) focuses on that topic. In fact, this book aims to decenter the One Child Policy in the history of modern Chinese reproduction. Of course, the One Child Policy is a vital part of Chinese reproductive history and that topic has been addressed at length in numerous important works, such as those written by Greenhalgh. However, my book neither provides a radically new way of interpreting the One Child Policy nor does it seek to challenge Greenhalgh’s robust academic legacy. Rather, Reproductive Realities aims to demonstrate that expanding the timeframe of historical analysis and exploring what came before the One Child Policy sheds new light on reproduction across the twentieth century. As I state in the epilogue, “Although state power over reproduction did gradually expand and intensify, bringing private life under government authority to an unprecedented degree,” taking a long view of history reveals that “these efforts built on a foundation established much earlier.” In short, I intended to supplement—not invalidate or challenge—the valuable work that came before mine by focusing on reproduction in the longue durée.
