Carrying Residue in the Philippines

An Ethnography of That Which Falls Apart from the Narratives of Pregnancy Loss

Abstract

After having lost my child in stillbirth, I took up the topic of "pregnancy loss" and travelled to the Philippines to conduct fieldwork in a squatter area in Metropolitan Manila. In my field site, women have experienced multiple pregnancy losses that could not easily be distinguished between miscarriage and abortion despite their clear differences from the standpoints of choice and legality in the Philippines-a predominantly Catholic nation where abortion is both constitutionally prohibited and stigmatized as a terrible sin while miscarriage and stillbirth are attributed to God's will and considered not worth discussion. This ethnography attempts to describe these women's "silent grief" surrounding pregnancy loss that never comes to surface. At the same time, it is an ethnography of a murk or "deposit (澱み)" in my understanding that I carried from the field, incapable at times of understanding the women's narratives of pregnancy loss and disenfranchised grief.