Convergent Reproductive Governance and the Normalization of Caesarean Birth in Northern Thailand

Abstract

Caesarean section (C‐section) rates in Thailand have nearly doubled over the past two decades, a trend often attributed to women's preferences, convenience, or advanced maternal age. Drawing on ethnographic research in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, this article argues that such explanations are insufficient. I show that rising C‐section rates are shaped by the convergence of biomedical discourses of risk with local understandings of bodily fragility, gendered spiritual vulnerability, and cosmological practices such as auspicious birth timing. I conceptualize this process as convergent reproductive governance, through which biomedical, familial, and spiritual authorities become aligned around a shared construction of childbirth as inherently dangerous and in need of protection. Women's reproductive decisions, often framed as matters of preference, instead emerge through negotiations across these intersecting domains of authority. Through this convergence, biomedical authority is reinforced through its alignment with, rather than displacement of, local knowledge.