This paper primarily traces the multivalent usage of the term 堕胎duotai (“falling fetus”), the standardized term for abortion, across Republican period Chinese newspapers (1911-1949). 堕胎 duotai encompassed multiple meanings during this period: voluntarily procured abortions, forced abortions, miscarriages, and induced miscarriages. Although abortion was criminalized in the Republican era through legal transplants from Japan-adapted European continental law, Republican newspapers demonstrate that not only were abortions a common occurrence, but that abortion and birth control were subjects that permeated the cultural imagination. In addition to newspapers, this paper draws on memoirs, legal cases and codes, medical articles, women’s journals and a gynecology handbook to show how duotai became a site of contestation between late imperial and modern ideas. Abortion was mediated in the Republican era through different public and private languages: the family, law, medicine, and the media. It served as a discursive site of both consent and resistance to modernizing ideals of marriage, family, sexuality, and ideal womanhood. These negotiations were often shaped by dynamics of intimate coercion, and at times, intimate and intergenerational solidarity. As a space where both public and private social languages intersected, discourses on duotai reflected, negotiated, and reconfigured the social spheres of the Chinese family, the conjugal unit, and late imperial definitions of reproduction, gender, and intimate body politics. I argue that despite rising biopolitical governance in the Republican era, the family continued to play a crucial interlocutory role in arbitrating abortions. This paper centers the intimate politics of family life and conjugal and kinship relations as an important locus for studying reproduction in twentieth century China.