At age 33 and raising six children in a slum named “Paradise Village,” Myrna Albos is “Exhibit A” for the Philippines’ serial family planning failures.
The plumber’s wife already had four children by the time a family planning law was passed in December 2012, but she had two more after opponents blocked it and the government health center near her shanty ran out of birth control pills.
“I don’t want any more [children]. Sending all of them to school is an effort. One more and I may no longer have time for myself,” the former department store clerk told reporters.
Albos and her family live on her husband’s US$10-a-day wage in a dirt-floor home in Paradise Village, tucked behind a smelly open sewer in the north of Manila, the nation’s capital where millions live in brutal poverty.
The law was meant to provide free condoms, birth control pills, implants and other family planning methods to couples in poor communities, while protecting mothers from death and other health risks associated with pregnancies.
The law was then hailed as a big victory for the rights of the poor, finally overcoming the powerful Catholic Church and their socially conservative allies in the Philippine Congress.
The Philippines, a former Spanish colony, is the church’s Asian bastion with 80 percent of the nation’s 103 million people Catholic. The power of the church has helped to ensure abortion and divorce remain illegal.
The country’s fertility rate slowed to 2.33 births per woman in 2015 from a runaway six in the 1970s, UN data show, but it remains an outlier.
The number of Philippine women who die from complications of giving birth also remains high, according to the UN figures.
However, the legislation turned out to be only the start of another long battle.
The law itself did not come into force until April 2014, as it was delayed by legal challenges. While the Philippine Supreme Court ruled the legislation was constitutional, it defanged the law by removing penalties for officials and workers who refused to provide contraceptives.
It has since been weakened further after some conservative legislators gutted its funding.
“We have not taken off. We’ve been taxiing for the last five years,” Philippine Undersecretary of Health Gerardo Bayugo told reporters in an interview, when asked to assess the program.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who took office last year, has followed in his predecessor’s footsteps in trying to get contraceptives to the masses.
The Philippine Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this month ruled that dozens of contraceptives, including implants and pills, were not abortion-inducing and thus the government could distribute them for free.
Condoms were not subject to the challenge, but only 2 percent of Philippine men use them, according to the health department.
This is partly due to men not wanting to use them and their expense.
Church-backed groups in 2015 filed a case with the Supreme Court insisting the implants and other contraceptives were abortifacients, and thus unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court then ordered the government not to distribute those contraceptives until the FDA made its own ruling on the issue.
Bayugo said the government had started to deliver 500,000 implants, the vast majority of its stocks, following this month’s FDA ruling.
However, he said it was not nearly enough to tackle the problem.
“The resolution will not cure the funding issue... It’s been our problem for the last five years,” he told reporters.
The health department estimates that 6 million couples need contraceptives, but have no reliable access to them.
This year’s allocated budget of 165 million pesos (US$3.2 million) is only enough for 2 million of these couples, Bayugo said.
While the government was banned from dispensing implants, Albos went to Likhaan, a charity that receives foreign funding.
She finally had an implant, which releases a hormone that prevents women’s ovaries from releasing eggs, after her sixth child was born this year.
Non-governmental groups, including Likhaan, have been providing birth control services to about 150,000 people falling outside the health department coverage, its executive director Junice Melgar told reporters.
However, even their own modest programs have suffered setbacks that highlight the enduring political problems.
Last year, scores of panicked women swamped Manila clinics demanding the removal of their hormone implants, Melgar said.
The women were scared off by a politician’s unfounded warnings the implants caused cancer, polio and even blindness, Melgar added.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS