‘If you cherish your body, you shouldn’t get pregnant’: bodily costs of childbearing in influencing Chinese female university students’ fertility intentions

This paper engages with 'the bodily costs of childbearing' or the negative physical consequences of pregnancy and childbirth and examines their role in shaping Chinese female university students' fertility intentions. A thematic analysis informed by corporeal realism was conducted with 30 semi-structured interviews with female university students without childbearing experience. The findings reveal that women's fear of bodily costs originates from perceived physical harm but is amplified by socio-structural factors, particularly post-feminist discourses that recast these costs as key to women's autonomous self-management. Yet fear alone does not determine fertility intentions. Three interpretive patterns of response were evident: bodily costs as a disease to be avoided by those who reject motherhood; bodily costs as a necessary sacrifice for those who embrace them; and bodily costs as a calculable exchange for those who remain uncertain. Across these patterns, women neither passively succumb to fear nor exercise unconstrained choice. Rather, they engage in the selective appropriation of socially available discourses, constructing meanings that align with their orientations towards motherhood. The body emerges not as a fixed site of suffering but as a negotiated terrain in which social structure and individual agency influence reproductive decision-making.