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Behind the Scenes with Sarah Varney, creator of the Beta Project
Interview conducted by Lauren Dee
Editor's note: Beta Project is an unusual feature for the Third Coast website in
that it was made not for the radio but as a tool for fostering discourse. It's
a great example of how documentary audio can be presented and experienced
beyond the airwaves and Internet.
Each Beta Project event is guided by carefully thought-out questions, which are
provided here for you to
download. The questions are in PDF format. You will need the latest version of
Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the document. > What is Beta Project?
How would you describe the Beta Project experience?
Using a multi-media documentary as a springboard for dialogue, it is the
mission of Beta Project to generate a new conversation about abortion rights in
the United States - one that is informed by history, acknowledges the
complexity of the issue and evokes the weighty and paradoxical experiences of
women considering and having abortions in America both prior to and following
Roe v. Wade.
We created a 35 minute audio documentary that tells stories of women's lives
before abortion became legal in the United States: stories about a woman who
travels alone to Tijuana, Mexico; a woman who boards a train to Baltimore; a
doctor's wife forced into sterilization; laws that required women produce a
certain number of children before they could have their "tubes tied."
We play the stories for groups at high schools and colleges and in communities
around the country - we call it an "audio dialogue." After a brief
introduction, the participants listen to a segment of the documentary, then are
instructed to get into small groups, usually four to six people, and discuss a
set of questions that we give them. The questions help them engage with the
stories and think about how they relate to their own lives today. The small
groups spend 10-15 minutes discussing the questions and then are called back in
to listen to the next audio segment. There are five segments and five
discussion groups. The event takes about two hours and at the end we invite
people to make public declarations, sort of Quaker style, about what world they
now see is possible. The declarations get everyone's goose bumps flying.
> What effect do you hope Beta Project has on its participants?
Our intention is to give people an emotional experience of an issue that is
framed as an abstract moral position--abortion is either right or wrong, murder
or not. Anyone who takes the time to talk with a woman who has had an abortion
(and about 43 percent of all women in the U.S. will have one in their lifetime)
knows that life is more complex than the absolutists would lead us to believe.
During a Beta Project event, people viscerally experience our shared history
and then practice in their small groups how to bring empathy and compassion
into the discussion. Ultimately what we want is for people to get talking -
talking with their families, with their friends. We want them to share the
stories they heard and add their own. We do a follow up survey after every
event and ask, "How many conversations have you had about your Beta Project
experience?" The response is incredible - people talk with their sons,
daughters, co-workers, and grandparents. People are moved to share their
experience - that's what we want.
> How do you create a setting in which participants feel comfortable
discussing this sensitive and often deeply personal issue?
The most important thing is for people to feel that they are connected to the
other people in the room and that they won't be judged. If we can do those two
things, people hopefully feel safe. We spent as much time designing the format
of the evening and the questions as we did doing the documentary. My mentor
Kathryn Clubb who worked on the project really shaped this.
The five segments of the documentary map to the five "stages" that we decided
people needed to go through before a new conversation about abortion could take
place:
The first step is to set the context for the evening. That means helping people
connect with each other and get clear on why we're here and what our hopes are
for the evening. When organizations or leaders want people to have an emotional
experience of something, they often dive right in to the horror; they put a
person up on a stage who tells a chilling story and the audience feels for
them, but they don't feel for them as a connected group. We felt strongly that
people needed to build relationships with the strangers in the room before
getting into the heart of the stories.
Next, we give people a set of common facts - in some cases those facts are
legal decisions ("It wasn't until 1965 that is was legal for married couples to
use contraception in all 50 states") or contraceptive failure rates. In other
cases, the facts illuminate the social mores of the time ("I would have lost my
job if my boss found out I was pregnant" "My father would have disowned me").
Through the audio segment and the questions, we establish a common knowledge
base among the people in the room.
The third segment is called "Choices" - now we start to meet some of the women
and men who will tell us their stories. It's everything up until the point when
they have an abortion ("I thought I was in love" "I was pregnant with my third
child and then caught measles"). We begin to understand all the ways people
come to make their choices and we reflect on the choices we see ourselves
making in the next few years. We're left thinking "Who I am to judge this
woman?"
The fourth segment is called "Paradox." These are the women's stories of their
abortions and through them we come to feel the paradox: the procedure is so
simple, yet women did so many things to get it; the procedure is so simple, yet
it had dire consequences for women's lives.
The final segment is about the future - if not this, than what? People reflect
on the journey they've just been on and discuss what has changed for them.
> How do you create a new discussion about an issue that has been
discussed and documented in so many ways already?
Our entire education system teaches us to discuss and debate - meaning we break
down issues into parts and we find the distinctions between the parts. We are
taught to justify or defend our assumptions. And in the end, someone wins and
someone loses - it's a zero sum game. While those skills help us make new
scientific studies or develop policies, they don't do much for complex human
problems. So, yes we've discussed and debated abortion, but we rarely have a
meaningful conversation about it. We rarely hear each other and simply bring
compassion to the choices people make. I have a definition of courage taped on
my computer that says: "Courage - speaking your mind by telling all of your
heart." That definition shaped all of Beta Project. Usually we think of courage
as moving forward in the face of fear, something soldierly, but what if courage
was simply the act of telling your heart?
> Why did you decide to take the personal approach at the issue of
abortion rather than the political approach?
The hyperbolic sound bites from the Pro-Life and the Pro-Choice sides have left
many in my generation numb and uninterested. For those of us who grew up after
Roe v. Wade, we don't have any first-hand experience of what life was like when
abortion was illegal. And it's rare that our parents and grandparents tell us
their stories. Beta Project is based on the assumption that people engage when
they have some emotional connection to the issue, and we believe you create
emotional connection through personal stories.
> How did you deal with the issue of objectivity while producing the
Beta Project?
News stories frame abortion using the exact polemic we are dismantling. A cut
from the Pro-Choice side is then matched by a cut from the Pro-Life side. The
reporter is forced to give equal airtime.
Our mandate is quite different and we have greater latitude in which stories we
choose to tell. Our intention was always to tell stories that illustrate an
undocumented period in our country's history. Just as it's critical to tell
stories of lynchings in the South and concentration camps in Nazi Germany, we
felt it was important to simply let women tell us what happened to them when
abortion was not legal and safe. No editorializing, no that was right or wrong;
it's simply what happened.
> Why did you choose audio documentary as the medium for the Beta
Project?
Great question. When I started the project, friends would say, You need visuals
- images of the women's faces on the walls or why not a film documentary? And
I've always thought that it's easier with film to think, Oh that could never
happen to me. You watch an African American woman telling her story of an
illegal abortion and kick out the image. Or maybe she has blonde hair and I
have brown hair. Or maybe she's overweight. Whatever distinction we can concoct
to keep us safe from believing that her experience could never happen to me.
With audio, it's not so easy. We invite people to close their eyes when
listening to the Beta Project. And what pictures do they attach to the voices?
Often pictures that look like them or their moms or sisters or best friends.
Audio is creepy that way. The listener has to do her own creating.
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