Spoof and tragedy

The president is on time. Her purple gown is big and wraps her shoulders like a protective gear. She is flanked by sunglass-sporting escorts and piña-clad lawmakers. The carpet is red and waiting.

As she walks to take her place in front of the giant Philippine flag, the president’s body language tells the audience she is upbeat. She waves like a movie star, nodding in all directions as if she knew everybody in sight. She is giggly like the colegiala she once was, fixing her hair compulsively and tilting her head just a little too much that you wonder whether her neck isn’t aching already.

She calls the attention of the Senate president for being too busy hitting the key pads of his cellular phone. He mumbles something about going after his lost pre-paid credits and wanting to download videos into his phone. And then the president starts addressing the nation, telling her countrymen that it is an important junction in history— Michael Jackson is dead and Santino has spoken to Bro.

It was a typical mock Sona, this one that took place at the Bahay Alumni at the University of the Philippines last Wednesday. The President is portrayed as the vain, shallow, glory-seeking, and truth-selective chief executive who bothers with trivial details and offers simplistic fixes to complex national issues. To a certain point, this mock exercise differs little from all the other imitations of the event that takes place today at the Batasan. Numerous other groups are out there to deliver their own versions of the president’s speech. The general idea is to ridicule the chief executive for her misplaced priorities and her doublespeak.

But this event stops being one of many mock Sonas when, toward the middle of the address, the president—the actor playing the role of Gloria Arroyo, that is—is confronted by her conscience. She is asked why there is no mention at all of the government’s reproductive health program in her speech. But it’s not an urgent issue, the president says. It’s the economy that matters. Women in dasters protest. This is just as urgent. And so this Sona—The State-of-The-Nanay Address—takes a different turn.

Veiled women, harbingers of sad stories, rattle off bleak figures for the president’s consumption. More than four thousand women, eleven in a day, die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related, but otherwise preventable causes. Thirty percent of pregnancies occur in minors. An estimated 400 thousand women undergo abortions every year. Sixty percent of married women do not anymore want to increase the number of their children, if only the knowledge and the service were available to them.

These do not include yet the more comprehensive—and disheartening—findings of international agency Save the Children Inc. in its State of Filipino Mothers Index 2008. Nor does it include the findings of the Social Weather Stations in October 2008 that 76 percent of Filipinos want family planning education in schools and 71 percent favor the passage of the reproductive health bill.

The figures are many and overwhelming but they point to the same message: something is wrong. Despite the Philippines’ impressive ranking in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report (the country is the best performing among all developing nations), Filipino women, specifically the poor and uneducated, are held hostage by poverty and lack of access to information that would enable them to give their children a better quality of life—and themselves enough health protection and power to determine their living conditions.

Now comes the reproductive health bill, also known as the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act of 2008, pending in both houses of Congress. The bill seeks to institutionalize the public’s access to family planning information and tools. It also paves the way for age-appropriate reproductive health education among children and adolescents. The bill’s advocates claim they have more than enough signatures from lawmakers to pass the bill and put it on the President’s table. But the chances of the bill ever making it to Malacañang are getting dimmer by the day.

For one, President Arroyo—the real one—has not shown any interest in seeing to it that the bill is enacted. Before the United Nations General Assembly one day in September 2005, during evaluations of member-nations’ progress in attaining Millennium Development Goals (Goal 5 pertains to bringing down the rate of maternal mortality), Mrs. Arroyo is reported to have said: “We expect the United Nations to respect the deep Catholicism of the vast majority of the Filipino people.” Four years, and it doesn’t seem as though the President is changing her mind. Whether it’s religious conviction or political expediency masquerading as religious conviction, she doesn’t seem inclined to sign the bill when it makes it to her desk. But at least she can do nothing and let it lapse.

At this point, however, there is still something she can do. She can certify the bill as urgent and require Congress, whose sessions begin anew today, to pass it within 20 session days.

That’s also the suggestion of the “konsyensya” to the Arroyo impostor during the mock Sona. Towards the end of the address, the President “sees the light” and heeds the suggestion. Is that a realistic expectation or a far-fetched dream? Reproductive health advocates are worried, especially since House Speaker Prospero Nograles has released a list of his priority measures which conspicuously does NOT include RH bill.

Admittedly, the timing is off. Elections are coming in less than a year and our lawmakers would not dare fall out of the graces of the Catholic Church hierarchy lest their chances (or the chances of their wives, children, brothers or sisters in case they are now on their last term) be compromised. Tragically, religious organizations can still make or break a politician these days. The public and the politicians themselves are not without fault for preserving this dynamo.

These lawmakers elected to represent the people conveniently set aside their constituents’ wishes for political expediency. (Of course I am talking about those who secretly support the bill but are too cowardly to do it publicly. We respect the views of those staunchly against it on the basis of their legitimate moral beliefs.)

Despite this, reproductive health advocates are psyched to fight it out these next few weeks. Anybody who believes that putting in place a national reproductive health program is less important than ramming Charter change down our throats these days is either stupid or does not really love his country. –Adelle Chua, Manila Standard Today

adellechua@gmail.com