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Eighteen-year-old Lyn has been suffering from chest pains and
shortness of breath for the past several months. She also started
losing weight since taking birth-control pills recommended by her
boyfriend’s aunt.
Lyn never had an opportunity to consult with a
medical practitioner, not even from the barangay health center,
before taking the pills.
She’s afraid of consulting a doctor because
she doesn’t want to be perceived as sexually promiscuous.
Lyn doesn’t know what the contents of the
pills are. She doesn’t know how the pills affect her body.
But she takes them blindly anyway because she
was told it would keep her from getting pregnant. Her boyfriend’s
aunt, who found out about her activities somehow, makes her take
them. It is doubtful if the aunt knows any better.
Lyn’s is a sad story not because she opted to
indulge in sexual relations early or because she is opting for what
the Church calls an unnatural method of birth control.
It is troubling because she is deprived of the
information she needs to come up with an educated decision over her
most important possession: her body.
She knows neither the natural or artificial
family planning method. She doesn’t even know where to get the
information.
All Lyn knows is that people will think less of
her if she is found out.
The reluctance to admit having sexual relations
with the boyfriend is a natural reaction to years of telling young
girls, directly or otherwise, that virginity is what defines a
woman, that it determines her worth as a wife.
Unfortunately, all these prejudices also deprive
the woman of the information she needs when she becomes sexually
active.
When a fetus was discovered in Malacañang
palace last week, President Gloria Arroyo, an avowed Catholic,
directed her social welfare department to conduct a massive
information campaign against abortion.
I hope this information campaign includes ways
to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Preventing unwanted pregnancies is
the surest way to prevent abortions.
According to PRO-Life Philippines, it estimated
that one out of four pregnancies end up in abortion.
Abortion is illegal in the Philippines and yet
it is widely practiced.
Some women want to avoid losing face because of
an unwanted pregnancy while others simply do not want to have any
more children.
I know of a happily married woman in her early
40s, the mother of three kids and soon to be a grandmother, who
found out recently that she was having her fourth child. She
contemplated getting an abortion because she was afraid that other
people would laugh that she, a lola, is pregnant.
Women contemplate or resort to abortion because
they cannot deal with the pregnancy.
But because they didn’t know how not to get
pregnant in the first place, they are left to deal with it.
Last Sunday our Parish priest was lecturing
against the reproductive health bill that he says will teach
elementary children how to use a condom. He riled against government
policy that forces children to lose their innocence prematurely.
The Church appears worried that including sex
education in the curriculum would encourage the youth to be sexually
promiscuous. They worry that some would consider artificial
contraceptives a license to be promiscuous.
I agree that we should keep children for as long
as we can. Innocence is something you cannot recover once you’ve
lost it.
But we mustn’t mistake being ignorant or
uninformed for innocence. Simply keeping information from children
is not assurance that they are protected from harsh realities they
deal with everyday.
And adults are not children and should not be
treated as children who, presumably, would not know what to do with
information given them.
Keeping women uninformed about their
reproductive health is risking more unwanted pregnancies and, as a
result, abortions or abandoned children in the future.
The lack of information, meanwhile, could lead
them to make decisions with implications they have no idea of or are
unprepared for.
I can imagine the individual who left the fetus
in Malacañang was only half-prepared for the backlash it stirred
up.
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