Would abortion provoke murder?

When my son had warned me not to propose abortion as a topic for our morning conversation group at the Georgetown Library I scoffed.  Our participants are sophisticated, well-educated professionals.  Still, when Monday morning rolled around, I had debut nerves.   

Peacefully, one at a time, seven participants gathered in the sunny room on the second floor of the library.  Ella, a teacher of Chinese to foreigners in the engineering department at a university in Beijing, as usual was the first to arrive.  Willowy, with closely cropped curly hair, Ella was elegant in a dark dress enlivened by a long navy sheer silk scarf with bright orange and green embroidered flowers.  She made me happy I had chosen my outfit carefully.   Anna Maria, an Italian economist, and Hoon, a dentist from South Korea, completed the well turned out chatty trio.  Hoon recognized a pretty young newcomer named Jihyn as a compatriot.     

When Pablo arrived we warmed up to our main topic, which this MIT-educated computer engineer had spawned as a follow-up to our grab-bag exercise on ethics, taken from an article from NPR that I had used the previous week  to demonstrate income inequality. 

There was neither controversy nor disagreement, for in their countries abortion is legal though with some restrictions.  In China, however, abortion is a delicate subject.  Parents are shy about talking about it with their children, according to Ella, who has served as an informal parental surrogate for more than one of her students.  For high school students who want to try out physical intimacy, Chinese schools offer lamentably little guidance, nothing more than a video.

 Mexico is divided between Mexico City and the countryside, our lawyer Mayra told us: the indigenous people do not even know there is a controversy surrounding abortion.  They believe in god and have a different ideology from people living in Mexico City where, alone in Mexico, abortion is not only legal up to 12 weeks; it is widely available and paid for by the city.  The indigenous people, however, like Trump’s supporters, believe that life begins at conception, while for those living in Mexico City women now enjoy the constitutional right to decide what happens to their bodies.  Anything else is considered harassment.  Women from other regions travel to Mexico City for abortions.  

The avid Pablo had read the article I had posted on Facebook but, following my son's advice,  I had not used as a handout, about getting an abortion in DC back in 1966.  Pablo had even gone to 14th and K Streets NW to see where girls waited for an abortion taxi sent by an abortion mill in Virginia.  
     They took turns reading a simple article about abortion that left a lot of openings for conversation.  Jihyn, who mixed up r’s and l’s, benefited from reading aloud, and the others read confidently.  Anna told us that in Italy the right to abortion was decided by referendum; there, where nearly everyone is Catholic, the only choice is whether to believe or not, unlike in the USA where there are so many religions and forms of practice.  Joking on the square, Anna added that only women should vote on abortion.  To Anna, having a referendum is the only sensible way to prevent politicians from using the issue to enflame emotions as is happening in USA  now.

There followed a discussion of religion, started by Chloe, a graduate student in traffic engineering who had arrived late.  Chloe believes in a god who promotes free will, not an angry god who punishes.  Anna mentioned that the Bible was not written by Jesus (contrary to what members of megachurches in the USA are told to believe), but by (gasp) men.  Anna went on to say that abortion is a moral problem about which people can agree or disagree.  Freedom of religion does not mean that everyone should be held hostage by one belief system.  What a paradox that pro-lifers are also pro-gun.  

The foray into religion led to an interesting digression.  We learned from Pablo that megachurches also exist in Peru where the latest scandal involved a church so rich it could buy a famous stadium.   In 2014 the Peruvian Congress debated an abortion case involving rape but did not come to a conclusion.  

It was not clear whether Hoon’s opinions about restricting abortion were held by others. In her view, in South Korea abortion is restricted, but not outlawed, arguably for two reasons: to keep the population from decreasing more; to keep women from becoming more like men.  Chloe explained that in the USA birth control pills are paid for by insurance.      

Wishing to reward my peaceful participants for their intelligent, respectful, and calm conversation, we finished off our session on a high note with some light-hearted articles.  The first was a humorous feature from the New York Post about how some goats employed to keep weeds in check in Riverside Park had been fired for being too voracious about their job.  Pablo could hardly believe that the article was literally about goats.

As usual, short articles from theweek.com did not fail to amuse.  The group applauded the incentive reported at Curry Pizza Co., in Fresno, California, of one free pizza for groups of at least four who agreed to surrender their cell phones: Anna had even been to a restaurant in Miami that offered a pretty basket as a temporary resting place for phones.  Mayra temporized about the temptation to use a cell phone in countries where wifi is available mostly in food establishments.  A squib about Illinois police requesting people to stop buying cellphone cases shaped like handguns provoked hilarious disbelief.

         The success of such a potentially explosive subject as abortion (and distribution of wealth last week) speaks to how intelligent and well educated our participants are, and I told them as much!  As a note, Chloe is in the final stages of writing her doctoral dissertation from GW on how to reduce vehicular pollution in China.  When she asked for a reference on writing in English I suggested Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.  Chloe's sexagenarian advisor, who has been bugging her through endless revisions, is old enough that he most likely follows it.
On our Facebook page, Hoon clarified her comments as follows: HoonJeong Hwang Thank you for your note. I think our law used to punish doctors who treated the pregnant women and involved women without exception, but according to the newly made judgement of Constitutional Court, it is not right to punish all the abortion cases. It seems very passive for abortion. We still have not established a law which defines the range of permits about abortion yet.
The reasons for abortion I mentioned totally came from my own opinion. It is believed in Korea that having a baby is a family work rather than a personal issue. We have believed that a fetus can have a life as soon as its conception. We traditionally ages a baby 1 year as soon as he or she is born.

The day after Easter turns out to be lucky: I receive a straw hat from Jacqueline

Anticipating how exhausted I would be after the first weekend of Passover I came close to canceling our group for the Monday after Easter.  Luckily, I did not.

Echoing my mood, Jacqueline and Pablo, the first to arrive, complained that the services they attended for Easter were unusually long.  Jacqueline took me aside to give me a fine straw sun hat from her home in Madagascar.

Rather than ascending like a piece of straw, my next gambit fell like a lead blimp: the group was not interested in the Mueller report .  They found however much to ask and say about the upcoming DC International Film Festival.   Once they learned that documentaries used actual people rather than actors they could understand why I recommended “The Eagle Huntress,” a Mongolian documentary about a young girl falconer, as an easier way than traveling to another country to learn about a faraway place.

Asia remained a focus.  The first short article we read from theweek.com  about fortune-telling, took us to China and back again.  Hoon, it turned out, is so expert as a Chinese fortune-teller that her friends in Seoul advised her to quit dentistry in order to make a nice living as a soothsayer.  Hoon  explained that in order to tell a fortune she needs four pillars: hour (within two hours), day, month, and year of birth.  Fortune-telling has become modern: the book that used to be consulted has been replaced by an app.  She had not yet become a proficient prophet  when she met her future husband but still believes that destiny brought them together.  Politicians do not know as much as they think, as was demonstrated when Hoon got no response to the multiple emails she sent to Hillary’s campaign advising them that Hillary would lose the election to Trump.  While Aoi and Hoon regard Asian fortune telling as a science, participants from Latin America respectfully disagreed. Pablo labeled it as pseudo science.  Williams added that shamans in Venezuela are charlatans who take advantage of gullible people.  

Not letting go of the subject, Aoi mentioned that not all that long ago in Japan name analysis was frequently used to give babies lucky first names that also complemented their family names.  There is still some superstition about lucky and unlucky days in Japan.  A rokuyo calendar is followed so that “death” days, inhabited by evil spirits, may be avoided for weddings and funerals, which therefore tend to be less expensive because very few people want to be married or buried those days.   No one in Japan would buy a house whose address had the number 4, just as in the USA, participants were surprised to learn, many buildings do not have a 13th floor, possibly because that was the number of participants at the Last Supper. Amy’s mother went to a fortune teller in China, which provoked problems with her husband who is a non-believer.  We all agreed that fortune-tellers would go out of business if they did not give hope.  

We raced through very short articles from theweek.com about a SWAT team responding to a home-invasion call occasioned by a noisy Roomba imprisoned in a bathroom, dogs sharing expensive meals with their masters in a New York sidewalk cafe, a man’s beard containing more germs than a dog’s fur, a man who sued his parents to the tune of $86,822.16 for destroying his pornography collection, and the campus police chief of Smith and Mt Holyoke colleges being put on administrative leave for having posted positive tweets about Trump; all  these occasioned serious and humorous comments, the last being Pablo's objection that the action against the campus police chief was an infringement of free speech.  Finishing up, our lightly bearded participant Williams revealed how he washed his beard after eating.

Welcoming topics: a student's return and that perennial favorite, food

Before our meeting on Monday, April 15, I encountered Mabel as I was going to the second floor.  Although she seemed to have other business at the Library I convinced her to come to the conversation club from which she had been missing for about a year. 

What a joy! Mabel became our show-and-tell.  She was a compendium of information about her Harvard fellowship on medical simulation that  she will finish in May, thus qualifying to teach this skill to her fellow cardiologists, although the US law prevents her from practicing cardiology in the USA.  We were amazed by the lifelike simulators she showed us on her phone.  These simulations, we learned, are used not only for pre-operative exercises but also to teach parents and professionals how, for instance, to interact with children who have cranio-facial malformations.  It was satisfying to hear Mabel speaking perfect idiomatic English, and to be personally thanked her confidence.

Food is always a welcome topic.  This time the spin was how their favorite cuisines are adapted in foreign countries.  In Japan, for instance, as Aoi told us, MSG is placed on the table in Chinese restaurants, unlike here in the USA where MSG is regarded with suspicion.  From Jacqueline we learned that in Madagascar rice, their staple food eaten three times a day, comes in 150 colors.  Jacqueline however prefers French cuisine.  For Marcela the biggest change from Colombia is adapting here to light breakfasts and lunches.  Amy got close to the article we were about to discuss when she said that we should use regional names like Hunan, Cantonese or Szechuan rather than lumping these distinctive cuisines together as Chinese food. Similarly, Anna objected to American Italian restaurants that serve nothing like Italian food which in her homeland is pretty simple with splendid ingredients.  The fact that his homeland Peru is a gastro destination has stimulated Pablo’s curiosity about food. Here he has begun his exploration with Thai, fast food, deep dish pizza and New York pizza. Owing to their similar climates, Carmen Luz does not find much difference between the foods of Chile and the USA. In general, although many do not like spicy food, everyone was willing to try what is on offer here.

We broke into two groups, each with a teacher, to read and discuss an article about the furor created when a young white female Jewish health guru opened a Chinese restaurant in New York claiming to serve clean food.  Each group worked up an argument, pro or contra, about whether the use of the term clean Chinese food should be used.

Group 1’s claims were presented by Shinobu with help from Mabel.

• “Clean food” as a term of art is not yet understood.
• This misinformation is deliberately magnified on social media.  
• Those on social media want nothing but to destroy reputation based on misinformation, here making a false claim that clean food has something to do with cleanliness, when in fact it means avoiding MSG, processed food, and ingredients considered toxic.
• There is nothing wrong with changing recipes for the purpose of assimilation, as has been done by kosher Chinese restaurants for decades and decades.

Even though they were presenting opposing arguments, Group 2 largely agreed with Group 1.   Anna said that the proprietor of the clean food Chinese restaurant, Arielle Haspel, should not use the word clean to mean healthy but that nothing could be done to prevent Haspel from trying to make her restaurant stand out.  Pablo agreed that clean food was a marketing strategy.  Aoi from Group 1 added that it is too early to use “clean food” as a concept.  Jacqueline, also from Group 1, added that Michelle Obama had started the trend with her effort to introduce healthy school lunches.