The Haunting Fetus: Abortion, Sexuality, and the Spirit World in Taiwan.

• Author: Katz, Paul R.
• Position: Book Review

By MARC L. MOSKOWITZ Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 2001. Pp. viii + 206.

During the past three decades, the legalization of abortion combined with the importation of popular beliefs and practices from Japan have reshaped the ways that Taiwanese women attempt to cope with the physical and emotional trauma of having an abortion. Marc L. Moskowitz's book on this subject, which is the revised version of his 1999 Ph.D. thesis, provides a vivid and at times moving ethnographic account of cults to fetus ghosts (yingling [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and fetus demons (xiaogui [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), spirits widely believed to be the souls of fetuses who were aborted by their mothers or who were miscarried. Moskowitz is highly qualified to research such a sensitive and deeply personal subject, having done extensive fieldwork in Taiwan from September 1994 to September 1999. In addition to visiting temples and shrines dedicated to the worship of fetus spirits, he also interviewed forty-three women and twelve men who had experiences with fetus ghosts or who were appeasing such ghosts, as well as ninety-three friends and relatives of people who had such experiences. The majority of his informants were residents of the capital city of Taipei, but he also conducted interviews with people from the central and southern parts of the island.

Moskowitz clearly sets forth his goals in the book's introduction, namely to provide a better understanding of the reasons why abortion has become increasingly prevalent in postwar Taiwan, as well as the personal, social, and religious ramifications of terminating a pregnancy. This important topic crosses the boundaries of religious and gender studies, and Moskowitz aptly traces the ways in which religious beliefs, as well as traditional ideas about morality, the family, and sexuality have shifted during Taiwan's modernization process (pp. 5-7). Moskowitz is also deeply sensitive to gender issues in modern Taiwan, or what he terms the "gendered realities of religious belief" (p. 11). He draws on his own research, as well as a growing body of scholarship on gender issues and abortion in Taiwan, to argue that a variety of structural and social factors lie at the heart of a woman's difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy, including the fear of becoming a single mother, the pressure to bear a male heir for her affines, concern about the economic difficulties of having an additional child, and pressure from her husband or the husband's parents. Moreover, many women suffer intense feelings of guilt due to the Buddhist belief that it is a sin to kill, and because of popular images of women as nurturing figures. Based on his analysis of these factors, Moskowitz...