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Struggling with a daily meal budget of less than $2 a
day for a family of 12, Floriza Bacli said she was happy to spoil
her children a bit on New Year’s Eve with something special—half
kilo of fried chicken and a quarter kilo of hotdogs.
Squeezed inside a tiny makeshift
shack made of galvanized steel and wood with her 10 underage
children, 37-year-old Floriza said the family had fun on the New
Year’s Eve feast, or the media noche.
“I wished my family would be
far from sickness, even though we might not get rid of poverty,”
Floriza said.
The mother of 10 said she hid
another seemingly more far-reaching wish in her heart. “Wouldn’t
it be nice if someone can pay the college fees for my two eldest
daughters who are finishing high school this April,” she added.
College remains a remote dream
for Floriza’s family that depends on her husband’s meager income
of P350 (about $7) a day as a pedicab driver. The husband might
return home with only P150 (about $3) in those low season days when
there are not so many tourists.
But Floriza said she remained
hopeful for the New Year, at least there would be no more unwanted
pregnancy to worry about. She got the yearned-for tubal ligation in
July, an operation that cost around P500 (about $10) at a local
clinic but would nevertheless effectively buffer the child-feeding
burden of the family.
“We really can’t afford to
provide for more. The money we earned is barely enough for our daily
meals,” Floriza said. Like most poor Filipino women, she had no
idea of family planning until life became tough after the birth of
her sixth child.
She thought about condoms, but
they were not quite accessible. She thought about contraceptive
pills, but was told that she had varicose veins. Floriza said if she
had known that a ligation was so simple and relatively harmless, she
would have had it done earlier.
A right deprived
In a country where a woman has
3.05 children on average and artificial birth-control methods are
frowned upon by the dominating Catholic Church, Floriza was not
alone in wanting to plan pregnancies. She was lucky to get one
before it was too late.
According to a United Nations
Population Fund report, half of the Philippines’ 3.1 million
pregnancies every year are unwanted or unintended, about one third
of which end in abortion. About 10 women in the Philippines die
every day for giving birth. Death occurred to mothers who are either
too young or too old or those who have more than three previous
births with dangerously short intervals.
Surveys also showed that more
than 60 percent of mothers do not want additional children, while
two out of five women who want to use contraceptives do not have
access to them.
Fearing the withdraw of support
from the Roman Catholic Church which counts 80 percent of the
approximately 90 million Filipinos as followers, the national
government has been cautious to widely and effectively promoting the
use of contraceptives, proper sex education in schools, and free
birth control services to the poor.
Baby ‘factory’
In Barangay Maisan where Floriza
lives, visitors may be overwhelmed by the number of children,
virtually everywhere in the crowded and poverty-dripping squatter
community. Toddlers hang on to their mother’s shirts, whose arms
are used to carry a smaller infant. Babies are being openly
breast-fed while mothers yell at their other children chasing each
other in the courtyard.
“Women in this Barangay know
about ligation but few can actually afford one due to its medical
cost and other inconveniences,” Floriza said.
Carlos Celdran, a local advocate
for women’s reproductive rights who paid for Floriza’s ligation,
said every time he went through squatter communities to give way
condoms and birth control pills, people eagerly asked for them and
the stocks he bought out of his own pocket from pharmacies would
soon run out.
“They want it; they need it,
and they use it,” Celdran said. “Birth control is something we
want but not given to us. It is a right deprived rather than
personal faith.”
“A pack of condoms that cost P5
is still too expensive for the poor. It shouldn’t be that only
rich people can plan the family,” said Celdran, whose regular day
job is guiding tourists around old towns of Manila and volunteer to
help squatter women plan their pregnancies and find affordable
medical services on birth control.
The hurdle facing people like
Celdran, however, is big and quite visible.
Blocks away from Barangay Maisan
stands the compound of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the
Philippines (CBCP), the seat of the Church authority in the country.
A banner declaring “pro-God, pro-Life, pro-Family, No to DEATH
bills, No to RH [Reproductive Health] bills” at the entrance
clearly demonstrated that any progress in family planning in this
Catholics dominating country wouldn’t come around without
overcoming strong resistance.
Bill shall pass
Because of the Church’s strong
opposition, a Congress bill promoting sex education, the use of
contraceptives and accessible birth control medical services on the
national level, has never gone out of the House of Representatives
since the introduction of its first draft in 1988.
In a statement issued in
November, Archbishop Angel Lagdameo of Jaro, president of the
bishops’ conference, said the reproductive health bill in its
present form “contains fatal flaws” as it poses a serious threat
to life of infants in the womb and violates the “sacredness of
life from conception.”
The Church branded the bill as
“anti-life” and said it would promote abortion, even its
provisions do not legalize or encourage it.
“We admonish those who are
promoting the Bill to consider these matters. It is the duty of
every Catholic faithful to form and conform their consciences to the
moral teaching of the Church,” Lagdameo said.
Lawmakers vying for a stable
political career were reluctant to ire the Church to openly and
aggressively promote birth control and family planning, thus many
remained closet supporters of the controversial bill.
Urgent need
Congressman Edcel Lagman,
principal author of the current draft of the reproductive bill, said
in an interview that there is an urgent need to guard the freedom of
informed choice so that each couple can decide what family planning
method would be best for them based on their own beliefs and
conscience, with neither the State nor the Church dictating to them
Lagman told Xinhua news agency in
an interview that with the support of high-profile politicians,
mainstream media, and the civil society, indications for the passage
of the bill are now “very encouraging.”
“We have 113 co-authors of the
bill apart from the two dozen congressmen who have committed to
voting for the bill,” Lagman said, adding that only 86 votes from
the 238-member House of Representatives are needed to endorse it.
A Social Weather Station Survey (SWS)
conducted in September 2007 finds seven out of every 10 Philippine
adults being polled said they favor the passage of the controversial
bill.
“The bill shall pass. Because
our chances are big as the Catholic Church is divided and the
opposition is not as strong as in 1990s,” Celdran said. “But we
could still lose the game, most of the congressmen on our side are
absent or are forced to be absent on the voting day.”
Not helpful
To Floriza, the bickering in
Congress seems remote and not of her concern. But she thinks it will
be a good idea for schools to provide proper sex education to her
daughters to teach them things like how to use condoms and how to
avoid unwanted pregnancies.
Washing piles of dirty clothes of
her kids at the street corner facing the country’s oldest
Baroque-styled edifice San Agustin Church, Floriza said she was too
shy and too lack of knowledge to teach her daughters.
Floriza said what she did was
simply forbidding her daughters to date boys before they graduate
from high school.
“I often warned them not to
follow my footsteps. I had learnt the lessons,” she said.
--Xinhua
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