Exploring the Unseen - Part II

The previous Interculturalist blog post was about the pervasiveness and hidden nature of culture. Today’s blog post continues with this theme and explores an example of the unseen part of culture. A recent Time magazine article offers a great testament to and illustration of the manifestation of this unseen side of culture in daily life. The article is about a career path that is foreign to most of us – being an astronaut. Specifically, the article reports on the criteria that female astronauts in China must meet and how it contrasts with the norm in the US. By reading this article, I think we can gain insight into the hidden nature of both Chinese and US culture. Here’s an abridged version of the article:

Would-be taikonauts have to meet near impossible standards that are meant to weed out the less-than-flawless. And if China's spacemen are expected to satisfy an unlikely string of qualifications, so too are its new spacewomen — with two notable additional criteria. China's first two female reserve astronauts, selected earlier this month from a pool of 15 female fighter pilots, were required to be wives and mothers.

The reasoning behind the prerequisite, according to officials, is that spaceflight could potentially harm the women's fertility. "It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," Xu Xianrong, director of the PLA's Clinical Aerospace Medicine Center in Beijing and a member of the selection panel, told the official government news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious, because this is a first for China." Ensuring that the female astronauts have already reproduced, he said, will guarantee that their family planning is not disrupted.

A 2005 study on reproductive health and spaceflight in the International Journal of Impotence Research, reports that about 80% of the American female astronauts who came to NASA were not mothers. Most female astronauts in the U.S. and other countries don't have children not because of the adverse effects of spaceflight but because they have intentionally delayed getting pregnant. Female astronauts who want to have kids tend to put it off early in their careers because of unpredictable flight schedules and because much of their training is forbidden if they're expecting. "Most prefer to get at least one spaceflight in before pregnancy," says Jennings, and are approaching their early 40s by the time they begin trying for children, when the risk of genetic defects and miscarriage is much increased.

As a potential solution, the report proposes not that female pilots begin having children earlier, but that members of both sexes store reproductive cells for future use. For women, banking eggs would not only eliminate the theoretical difficulty of damage to reproductive tissues by cosmic radiation, but also solve the problem of age-related fertility decline.

When you read the above account, did you feel more in line with the Chinese policy or the US standpoint? If we look at this status from a cultural standpoint, there are certainly some values that are underpinning the rationale for both the Chinese policy and the US orientation. What does China’s policy toward female astronauts say about its values? What values or beliefs are underpinning and supporting this as an acceptable policy? At the same time, what does the US’s non-policy, tendency to delay childbirth, and proposal to store reproductive cells say about its values and beliefs?