Abortion and sin

Wow, a nice, non-controversial title, huh?

So I'm working my way through the interviews (and dang did I take a lot of interviews!) annotating them and transcribing bits I want to quote, and I just got to a really interesting conversation I had almost forgotten about.  My interviewing techniques completely broke down - yes, I am asking yes and no questions here, and yes, that's awful.  what can I say.  Actually, I was not only asking poor interview questions, I was also asking really insensitive ones - I had several times been told not to ask about abortion at all, because the taboo on talking about it was too strong, and when I asked about it in the past I had, indeed, had a few people just shut down on me.  So it was wise advice I received, but I think I was also wise to disregard it sometimes.

Anyway, I am not presenting this as an example of camila being an awesome interviewer. But I thought despite my incompetence, the result was interesting  With hemming, hawing, and some translating from tagalog cut out, it looks like this:

Me: What kinds of questions do you get the most?
Gladys (teenaged RH activist/youth educator/general badass): Mostly girls asking about missed periods and pregnancy.
Me: What information do you have for them?
Gladys: We can give them counseling [talks a bit about early-pregnancy counseling]
Me, diving headfirst into cultural insensitivity: Do they ever ask about abortions?
Gladys: Sometimes we get girls who inquire about abortions, but then they decide to continue the pregnancy.
Me, surprised that she answered calmly, and that they talked about it at all: We talked earlier about the taboo on talking about sex - are the youths who are open to talking about contraceptive use generally open to talking about abortion, too?
Gladys: Yes.
Me (continuing to be surprised): Are they open to the idea of actually having abortions?
A pause.
Gladys: When the contraception fails, they are open to do abortions.
A pause.
 Gladys: There are young pregnant women who are open to having abortions when they get pregnant, but as long as their parents don't know they are pregnant. But that's only 10%.  For the young pregnant women whose parents know about her pregnancy, she'll still continue the pregnancy.
Me: Are the parents opposed to abortion?
Gladys, looking at me like I'm a complete idiot: Yes, of course. They believe that abortion is a sin.  And that it may cause harm to the child-bearer.
Me: And the young people don't believe this?
Gladys: They have the same beliefs.  They both think that abortion is a sin.  It's still quite a sin to them.Me: Can - can you explain a little more?  They agree that abortion is a sin, and have the abortions anyway?
Gladys:  Sort of.  They agree with their parents on abortion, that abortion is a sin
Me: But...
Gladys: If the knowledge about pregnancy - if only the boyfriend and the girl knows about the pregnancy, then they push for an abortion.   They may go for an abortion.  The barrier is - I mean, the thing that stops them from getting an abortion - is the parent's knowledge.
Me: so in the percentage where the parents don't know, and they do have an abortion, do they still believe it's a sin? Or is it - I mean, is it only a sin if their parents know?
Gladys: They think it is still a sin, but that they lack a choice.  They still consider it as a sin, but they still prefer an abortion.  And if the parents know about the pregnancy and about the abortion, well... if the parents will know that she had an abortion, she's dead.


So - the way I parsed this conversation - everybody agrees that abortion is a sin, but it's not actually moral objections to abortion that cause teenagers with unwanted pregnancies to continue their pregnancies.  It's not even the high risks involved in cheap, illegal abortions. It's their parents' moral objections - or more specifically, the punishment (and "she's dead" might sound like an exaggeration, but by this point in my trip, I made no such assumptions) that their parents would enact if they knew about the sin.

Either way, Gladys describes teens who feel like they have no choice.  If the parents don't know, then they have to abort; and if their parents do know, then they have to continue (and get married, in many communities).

And look back at the start of the conversation - these young people, if they are lucky enough to have an RH advocacy group active in their area, only seek information AFTER they think they might be pregnant.

Sin?  The idea of sin's not preventing abortions, or causing them.  It's knowledge that's determining these kids' actions - their own knowledge about contraception, and their parents' knowledge about their actions. 

Then again, the original sin was the pursuit of knowledge, so maybe I'm reading it all backwards...

transcription

thanks, Julie, for your tip! 

she had great advice that enabled me to make a poor life decision.  for instance, by combining F4 and NaturallySpeaking, I have developed a system that allows me to make pretty accurate transcriptions - with time stamps!  - using a headset and 2 keys on the keyboard.  pretty quickly - faster than realtime, actually, as long as I am taking cliff-notes for most of it and only fully transcribing the bits i want to quote.

this, in turn, allows me to transcribe while lying down with my eyes closed on a comfy couch.

which, in turn, uh... well... i'm sure you can fill in the blanks...

WHY DID I ASK SO MANY QUESTIONS

WHY

I could have said, "so, why did you become an activist?  can you explain a little more?  great, thanks!" and had 60 15-minute interviews... instead I have HOURS and HOURS and HOURS to go through!  somewhere north of sixty hours of audio!  I'm only transcribing a fraction, and even so I want to rip my hair out!

WHY DID I PUT THIS OFF UNTIL NOW

WHY

nuts and bolts

Soo, does anybody with more experience in grant-receiving have any advice on taxes?

Because I'm strictly bound to only use the money I get to pay for my trip, right?  Which I have done.  But I still have to pay taxes on that money, but because I can't use the grant money to pay for the taxes, I'm left kind of in a bind.

Of course, if those grants were my only income, then my deductible would cover it and everybody would be happy.  But I also have the scholarship funds that pay for my college education... and yes, Virginia, I pay taxes on those, too (everything that isn't tuition).  Add in the fact that I'm getting money to go to London in the fall, and I am fairly positive that my tax bill will be larger than my total non-grants-and-scholarships income for the year, and certainly larger than my savings account.  And not just a little bit larger.

I've been thinking, but I don't think I can possibly budget tightly enough to save that money out of what my scholarship will cover in London - there's not a lot of wiggle room there to being with.  My current plan is just to spend the grant and scholarship money as I was instructed to do, and then borrow money to pay for the taxes.

I'm not complaining - it's a great problem to have, and if I have to take out loans to cover the taxes on my grants and scholarships, well, it's still a great deal.  But I was wondering if anybody out there who has done this before can reassure me that this is standard practice for grant recipients?  or is it an unusual side effect of being personally broke, but in strictly-regulated-possession of large amounts of other people's money?

(Confidential to Jenny:  I love taxes!  Taxes are great!  My taxes cover lots of wonderful programs!  I don't mind paying taxes as it is my duty as a citizen benefiting from the services provided by this great country!  WHOO TAXES)

The journey is my heartbeat in this plane

I read this poem early in my trip, and thought of it again in a plane heading to Davao - a flight in some ways more daring and profound than my long haul across the Pacific, and yet an utterly prosaic trip.  I looked in my emotions and found not a trace of profundity, wondered at the absence, stared out the window, checked my watch.  Was I feeling what I ought to have been feeling?

A funny question, no?


The Journey is Everything

Montaigne believed the journey, in itself,
Was the idea.  Yet from this moving plane
I look down on the dazzle of the world,

Conscious of his words but wondering
When, when shall I be here, at journey's end?
The journey, said Montaigne, is everything.

Two hours ago the setting out began
With words of love.  It is too soon to be
In love with landscape, altering below --

The flight upriver and the dwindling hills --
As if I came for this, a traveler,
And every wisp of cloud were an obsession.

It is too soon  The journey is myself,
Concerned with where I was, where I must go,
Not with the clouds about me (what of them?),

Not with the morning skies -- nor would Montaigne
Have noticed them, his mind on other things.
The journey is my heartbeat in this plane.

Yet with more time?  Were the excursion longer
to the Cote d'Azur et d'Or, perhaps, La Mer,
the hyacinth fields of Haarlem, Tanganyika,

The river Lethe or the Serpentine,
The fortunate Isles or Nepal -- anywhere,
I might discover what his words still mean:

The journey, in itself, a thing apart.
But no.  These words are older than Montaigne's:
The sky is changed.  I have not changed my heart.

Helen Bevington

home again home again

I do have some more posts to write and put up, but I don't think I'll get around to them any time soon... alas, the to-do list awaiting my return is painfully long.  but i do have more thoughts to think my way through, no worries.

music

So when I first got here in Manila and was listening to the radio in the taxi, I actually thought that they were live-broadcasting videoke (that's karaoke for everybody in the world but Filipinos).  I knew that videoke was a huge thing here, and after hearing, over and over again, songs by Jason Mraz, The Black-Eyed Peas, Akon... but sung by lovely, lilting female voices over acoustic guitar... i was just super confused.

Turns out that cover songs are just a really big deal here in the Philippines.  How big of a deal?  You ever heard of a band named Journey?

Their current lead singer was from a Filipino band that did covers of Journey songs... did them so well that Journey HIRED HIM.  And while that might be unusual, every Filipino artist, it seems, releases at least one album consisting entirely of covers of Western bsongs.

Why?  I hear it's cheaper than hiring someone to write cheaper songs.  I hear it's safer to choose a song people already know and like, rather than risking something new.  Mostly, though, I hear that it's an expression of colonialism

Anyway, whether you're a filthy colonialist or not, I suggest you support the Filipino economy by buying Princess Velasco's "Addicted to Acoustic" albums.  They are awesome.  Based on my highly scientific acoustic survey (by which i mean, i listen to the radio sometimes), she is the currently undisputed qu- uh, Princess - of Filipino acoustic covers.

I hear it's really hot back home... put on this album, sit outside, and have someone blow cigarette smoke in your face, and you can totally pretend you're hanging out in Manila in the summertime.

It's... it's more fun than it sounds like.  I promise!

Anyway.  Have some Princess in your life.  You're welcome.














(haha i love the pictures selected for this video... "American woman" vs "Filipina woman."  Classic.



On another note, I feel like mentioning it places me firmly within the sex-negative and mean-spirited celeb gossip world, but Princess made her way to fame through a sex scandal... a doozy of a sex scandal.  And surprisingly enough all the women involved (oh there were many) seem to have moved on to fabulous careers, while the (male) asshole at the center of it all pretty much got kicked to the curb by pop culture.  And the medical board.  Yeah, he was a doctor, I don't know why he was a celebrity, it was weird.

Anyway, how does this relate to the maria clara model for filipina behavior?   are filipinas liberated from the old cultural rules valuing chastity above all, or equally confined by new rules that value sexuality instead?

Discuss!  With the acoustic cover of tik tok in the background!  Seems fitting, right?