New Birth Control Bill Creates Enemies In The Philippines

"Abortion is illegal in the Philippines, though birth control and related health services have long been available to those who can afford to pay for them through the private medical system. But 70 percent of the population is too poor and depends on heavily subsidized care through the public health system. In 1991, prime responsibility for delivering public health services shifted from the central government to the local authorities, who have broad discretion over which services are dispensed. Many communities responded by making birth control unavailable.

More recently, however, family planning advocates have been making headway in their campaign to change this. Legislation before the Philippine Congress, called the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act, would require governments down to the local level to provide free or low-cost reproductive health services — from condoms and birth control pills to tubal ligation and vasectomy. It would also mandate sex education in all schools, public and private, from fifth grade through high school.

Supporters of the bill cite urgent public health needs. A 2006 government survey found that between 2000 and 2006, only half of Filipino women of reproductive age used birth control of any kind.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization based in the United States that works to advance reproductive health, 54 percent of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines in 2008 were unintended. Most of these unintended pregnancies — 92 percent — resulted from not using birth control, the institute said, and the rest from birth control that failed.

These unintended pregnancies, the institute says, contributed to an estimated half-million abortions that same year, despite the ban on the procedure. Most of these abortions are done clandestinely and in unsanitary conditions. Many women resort to crude methods like those Ms. Judilla attempted.

Moreover, maternal deaths in the Philippines are among the highest in the region: 230 for every 100,000 live births, compared with 110 deaths in Thailand, 62 in Malaysia and 14 in Singapore, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

The bill’s main proponent in Congress, Representative Edcel C. Lagman, also argues the need for a check on population growth in the interest of national welfare. The Philippine population is estimated at 92 million and is growing at more than 2 percent annually, one of the highest rates in Asia. “Unbridled population growth stunts socioeconomic development and aggravates poverty,” Mr. Lagman wrote in an op-ed column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

But attempts to make reproductive services more broadly available met stiff resistance, leading to the defeat of several earlier bills over the past decade.

The main opposition in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country has come from the church and affiliated lay organizations, which say the proposed law would legalize abortion."
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