Rituals for abortion and miscarriage in Taiwan: Spiritual and social representation of the fetus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Taiwan, abortion ritual attempts to appease or rescue Yingling (fetus spirits), who are the spirits of fetuses that have died from abortions or miscarriages. Within most contemporary religious discourse, abortion is seen as an inappropriate means of ending a life. Yingling are believed to wander in the world of the living or the world of the dead (the underworld), and are longing for the care of their parents. This discourse further claims that fetus spirits should be released from their attachments and sent back into the cycle of reincarnation for rebirth, so that their parents’ bad karma could be reduced. This thesis analyzes the abortion ritual in Taiwan with the focus of the imagination of the Yingling by means of scrutinizing the semantic meaning of ritual process and ritual symbols. Within such a dynamism, the personhood of the Yingling is constructed, and a new sense of community as well as a new sense of identity are generated. The styles of rituals surveyed differ from each other sharply in terms of doctrines (vernacular to transnational; sympathetic to disciplinary), forms (simple to elaborate; free-of-charge to very pricy), and level of involvement (distanced to fully engaged). It is noteworthy that these styles of rituals are rarely “brand new” in the religious context in Taiwan. In fact, familiar liturgies, authority of gods/goddesses and ritual objects in Chinese religion are still employed and comprise the fundamental frame of the ritual. Nonetheless, new elements of myth, new meanings of the parent-child relationship and new imagination toward the spirit are introduced. An alternative reality is created through the ritual process and ritual symbols, which compete with the political, social and scientific discourses present in Taiwan. This alternative reality is significant because it is incorporated into the lived experiences surrounding the individuals and society, which transforms their understanding of the self and the other (lost infant, family, and community)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".