Contraceptives hard-to-come-by for impoverished women

Ask 46-year-old Filipino woman how many children she has.

“Ten,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “But I was supposed to have only six,” she added, snapping in a breath.

After the sixth pregnancy, she decided that she and her husband, a casual laborer who earns an average of $4 a day, should not have any more children.

“My husband doesn’t have a stable job. There are days when we don’t eat so that our children can,” she told Xinhua in an interview near her residence in Manila.

She said that she asked for birth control pills from a local health clinic but was denied, because the clinic was “pro-life” and advocated only natural family planning methods, toeing the line of the Catholic Church, which counts 80 percent of Filipinos as followers.

“Sometimes I would ask my husband to sleep in another room just so nothing would happen,” said the woman, as she shared her own prescription of birth-control approach, which obviously failed and resulted in four more babies.

But her case of unintended pregnancy is not uncommon in today’s Philippines.

Millions at risk

The Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit organization that conducts global research for the advancement of reproductive health, said their survey last year showed that about 10.2 million Filipino women are at risk from unintended pregnancy. Most of them are married.

A similar local study showed that more than half of the 3.4 million pregnancies per year in the Philippines were unintended, and 92 percent occurred to women who either used no contraceptive method or an inappropriate one.

Despite the health benefits of contraception, the use of it is far below the apparent demand, especially for women from impoverished families who could not afford it.

The Guttmacher study said the low ratio of contraceptive usage among Filipinos has a major impact on maternal health and mortality.

National health surveys conducted by the government in 2006 showed that maternal mortality measured 162 deaths per 100,000 live births. The study said that 12 percent of maternal deaths were caused by unsafe abortions.

In the Philippines, where 90 million of the population is predominantly catholic, the Church has a significant influence on government policy. And with no national government-backed reproductive health policy in place, except the natural family planning advocacy, local government units are left to implement their own individual policies to meet contraceptive needs.

The city of Manila, where the woman with 10 children is a resident, is a staunch advocate of natural family planning methods. In 2000, the city mayor even issued an executive order banning government clinics from handing out modern contraceptives.

Impact on crisis

Sharon Camp, president and chief executive officer of the Guttmacher Institute, said the current global economic slowdown might further delay the appropriate government approach toward family planning.

“Governments, when faced with budget constraints, may cut budgets for family planning, but investing in contraceptive services not only enables women and their families to plan their births and avoid serious health complication often accompanied by unintended pregnancy, it also saves money,” she said during the study’s launch in Manila.

Camp said the costs associated with unintended pregnancies, including treating the consequences of unsafe abortion, are much higher.

A Reproductive Health bill providing universal access to contraceptive methods and devices has been sitting in the Congress for the last 20 years. Pressure from the Church has been a major factor in hindering the passage of this bill.

Part of the controversy that surrounds the passage of the bill is that it will condone and even allow abortion, as Church critics count the obstruction of forming an embryo as guilty of abortion.

Abortion illegal

In the Philippines, abortion is an illegal and punishable act, with no exceptions even on the grounds of endangering a woman’s life, rape or fetal impairment.

Edcel Lagman, the main author of the bill, however, said the reproductive bill would not legalize abortion.

One of its pillars simply mandates that women suffering from complications of abortion be attended to and treated in a compassionate and non-judgmental manner, he explained.

“The bill can, in fact, be said to be anti-abortion because it offers access to reproductive health care information and devices, “ Lagman said. –Ana Santos, Xinhua