Microcosms of transition

Finding myself back in Canada following a seven-month stint in Montenegro, I am still sorting through my experiences. Being a subscriber to regular news items from the excellent Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), I found that much of what I witnessed and experienced in Podgorica (and elsewhere) was complimented by the informed content I read from the folks at BIRN.

I frequently found myself pondering the issue of relationships and the lives of young people outside the academic/professional sphere. I was especially curious to see how people my age related to the transformations taking place in their society, as well as how these changes were affecting them.

Montenegro is a special case in point, since the country is so small; its population is somewhere in the vicinity of 650,000, so I was expecting some degree of modesty and conservative traditions to predominate everyday life. Everyone knows someone who, in turn, knows some other people; what goes around comes around. Networks are extremely wide and strong in the Balkans, a legacy of a decade of war and crippling sanctions, but also steeped in tradition.

This story, therefore, is slightly unrelated to what I have described, and it deals specifically with Serbia. Its conclusions and implications, however, apply and extend to Montenegro, and some of what I learned and observed while there. This piece reports: "Health officials report that between 150,000-200,000 abortions are carried out every year in Serbia, news-site Mondo reported Monday...Every twelfth woman between the ages of 15-49 years has had an abortion. Most had not used contraception."

Serbia's total population is a little higher than 7,300,000. In the early 1980s, Serbia already had the reputation for having one of the highest abortion rates in Europe, a fact that nationalists failed to point out when they identified the high Albanian-speaking population within Kosovo and the declining number of Serbs in the province.

I do not know the statistics for Montenegro, but they are something just as frighteningly high, in proportion to the country's small size. Statistics are hard to come by, since Montenegro keeps getting looped in with Serbia, despite three-plus years of independence (go figure). Someone told me that it was in the range of the thousands.

Returning to this story: "[Dr. Katarina] Sedlecki [of the Family Planning Centre of Serbia] considers the abortion situation in Serbia as severe as every fourth abortion was carried out on women who had already had four or more abortions...She added that there are few organised efforts to promote sex education, or to provide information on how to limit family size in Serbia's family planning programme...Sedlecki stressed that economic factors are not the main reason for the high number of abortion cases in Serbia."

The story points out that other researchers indicated that there remain low levels of knowledge concerning contraception, the nature of abortions, "a belief that modern contraceptive methods are harmful to health, and a number of psychological barriers, [including] those arising from relationships with partners." They should also have pointed out, as I witnessed first-hand repeatedly, the social stigmas that befall women in particular that choose to become sexually active (or are just perceived to be such).

Little else can be said from this report, only that so many of the social problems confronting these 'transition' countries, like Serbia and Montenegro, are as much structural and political as they are societal and habit-borne. Montenegro is the tougher fish to fry, just because these realities are shrouded in tradition, secrecy and patriarchy. I found myself frequently frustrated, unfairly perhaps, by such tradition-honed factors that have persisted, despite the obvious negative outcomes that result. This arena of abortion rates in the region is just one aspect of this, and persists not so much out of necessity as it does because of other factors that, evidently, trump economics and the tangibles.

Revolutions have this invisible, yet potent factor to take into account. Montenegro (and Serbia) has a long way to go -- a generation or two, I would reckon -- before anyone can talk about full-out success in conquering legacies and habits forged by past experiences. I say this with sadness, because Montenegro is a country I adore, and consider like my second home and nationality.