Seesawing between poverty and ignorance, prejudice and self-righteousness
In the 1960s and 1970s in Thailand, I had the privilege of breaking out of the ivory tower of my bourgeois roots through association with monks recruited from among the poor and intensive involvement with women who had fallen to the bottom of the pile. In a steeply hierarchical society, they taught me to see life from the bottom up, and even as I could never participate in their experiences, I learned to sympathise with the logic of a hand-to-mouth existence in which my views didn't hold. In those years in the Netherlands, we enjoyed the break through of the pill and the decriminalisation of pregnancy termination. Henceforward, women could and should be boss over the own body, which was an opinion shared by the Bangkok women with whom I was in touch. They were not impressed by the nice-people authored ban of abortion that was, albeit in underground conditions, readily accessible.
To them, the ways of the self-satisfied 'good people' belonged to another universe of discourse, and one does not need to have fallen to the bottom to agree on this. In the Philippine countryside where I live, girls as of age 13 are pregnant first and marry later. Subsequently, some of them save to have their union solemnised in church later. Even as estimates of the number of secretive abortions in this country run from ½-1% of the total population per year, resort to it hereabouts is said to be uncommon as the means of pregnancy prevention are well known and available. In spite of this, those high-up—the Church, politicians, lawgivers, religious zealots, and even health providers—are determined to torpedo the proposed Reproductive Health Bill. Women's health, poverty, and even family planning are none of their concern. In an editorial, the low-brow daily Bulgar: the Voice of the Masses called it "The war between the people without and with morals” (09.11.10). With morals are those who agree with the Church, and they are not immoral because they keep mistresses, steal from the state, abuse their labourers, cheat their customers, oppress the peasantry, or shamelessly gamble. In the Philippine discourse, words like 'moral' and 'immoral' have lost all sense, conform the rear window sticker "Pro Gun, Pro Life."
View from below
The collection brings together the narratives and reflections of some twenty activist-scholars who are committed to women's health, family welfare, reproductive and human rights. Ergo, they have their roots in discourses that are well beyond the view of the people they write about. Whereas this is an anthropological truism, the five ethnographical chapters (3 situated in Southeast Asia, 2 on the Subcontinent) on abortion practice and experience do open a perspective from the bottom up, and the view they open is not beautiful. It seems as if we have landed in a funnel sky-scraping from ignorance, uncertainty, poverty, arbitrariness, and awareness of risks, to complacency, negation, indifference, sophistry, and hypocrisy. The poor suffer, and up there nobody cares; in spite of their morals, the rich go and get their way, also when they need a safe abortion.
This litany is balanced by three chapters that are devoted to activism and reform (on Indonesia; Malaysia; Thailand) that, together with the first set of chapters sandwich a half-way policy and half-way culture oriented chapter on Vietnam. Because the holy cow of Family and Life is stubbornly resistant to reform, the activist chapters dwell extensively on the ground work of lobbying, influencing those who matter, what to have in the news and what to keep indoors, etc. We seem to have to live with a painfully slow process of enlightenment, in which, these days more than ever, those on top are pressured by an array of fundamentalists, nationalists, arch conservatives, and other Dutch uncles.
Personal experiences, reasons, uncertainties, reflections, and the volatile mix in the funnel recur over and over again in the ethnographic case studies, even as their mix varies. All the time, these are implicitly or explicitly placed in a hoped-for context of reform and open-mindedness. It is not that the wall of silence and conservatism is impregnable; on the contrary, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and India (case of Tamil Nadu) have liberal laws on their books, and still the desire for (safe) abortion is frustrated by prejudice, unavailability, ignorance of the law, physicians' arrogance, religious and other beliefs, and so on.
Intentions
The editor introduces the collection with a pellucid Overview in which a whole gamut of structural forces, gender configurations, worldviews, and understandings of women's bodies are reviewed, and in which anticipations are sounded about how these affect the control women and men have over reproductive decision-making. These, and interventions at the macro levels of the state and international donor agencies are, in their ways, propulsive factors in the occurrence of unsafe abortion and its negative effects on women's health and mortality. Through bringing this out in the open, the book is hoped to spark a dialogue between academics and advocates and between anthropology and public health (4-5).
To this, she notes the discrepancies between the high-flown intentions voiced in conferences on women, population, public and reproductive health, and down to earth culturally specific ideas of self and personhood. Whereas the first derive from western ideas on individual personality and its agency, in most places in this world the person is seen and self-experienced as enclosed in its group—subsequently, such groups (family, clan) are the basic units of society. This is even confirmed at home as every year, in Amsterdam, we have a number of 'honour killings' of straying sisters who besmirched the name of their closed group among people of Turkish descent. So, even as the murderers have been born and bred in the Netherlands, their ideas about personhood remain deeply primordial. As a result, the editor observes that, across Asia, the notion of reproductive rights vested in the idea of 'property of one's own person' is novel and a challenge to activists (23), as decisions involve the family members and the ancestors, to boot (27).
Asia?
Be this as it may, I am uneasy with 'Asia' and 'Asian.' Apart from a geographic connotation, I am not aware of cultural commonalities among Israeli, Yemenites, Farsi, Samoyeds, Tibetans, Austronesians, East-Asians, and Hindus. Besides, seven of the substantial chapters concern Southeast Asia, with a lonely one about adolescent women in Dhaka's slums and one on the cost of abortion in Tamil Nadu. The country profiles of other states of South and East Asia that the editor dutifully provides are perfunctory and play no role in the development of the collection. Perhaps 'Asia' was inspired by the spurious idea of 'Asian Values' that is invoked by demagogues, but that cannot be anthropologically substantiated.
The idea resurfaces in the editor's epilogue on the research agenda ahead when she notes "the moral panic across Asia over earlier ages of initiation of sexual activity, and what is seen as modern western values usurping Asian values" (244). Such a panic and the idea of usurpation is certainly propagated by self-serving politicians, but at mine, in the country, nobody panics when a pubescent girl gets pregnant—it is the mere going with the flow of life as it has been moving since time immemorial.
Since the same factors keep recurring, continuous reading of the collection can be wearisome. Whereas one of the merits consists in the attention to detail, at times it also takes the view from the wood for the trees. The positive side of this method is that it offers insight in individual experiences, decision making, the morals of those up there, and activist strategies and priorities. In brief, the collection is a treasure trove of information on a delicate and ill understood subject.