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THE fact that we are now seeing more women dying in this country each day due to causes related to pregnancy and childbirth seems to be of little import, or of insignificant concern, to our shepherds.
In a public statement published in this paper yesterday, Cebu Archbishop Jose S. Palma devoted just two short paragraphs in his 12-paragraph message to the issue of maternal deaths. “The issue in maternal death as it has been mentioned is a serious concern,” Archbishop Palma concedes. “But the solution does not lie in suppressing births as provided by the [Reproductive Health] bill.” Instead, he asserts that “providing proper and adequate maternal care could be done without passing the RH bill, but by strengthening and improving access to existing medical services.”
Well, I have news for the good archbishop. “Strengthening and improving access to existing medical services” is precisely a key provision of the RH bill he so abhors. And providing family planning information and services is a key component of maternal and child health services, since these allow women and men to plan their families, space pregnancies and births, and prevent or curtail future pregnancies if the couple believe they already have the number of children they can adequately feed, nurture, educate and love.
What is so sinful or criminal in providing a woman who is too young, too old, too tired, too sick, or has had more pregnancies than is good for her health, the means to delay or prevent any more pregnancies? Is saving women’s lives simply a matter of “serious concern”? Is it not an imperative, a demand on society as a whole, including our spiritual leaders?
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I DON’T know—and frankly don’t care—how large or small was the Church-sponsored rally to “stop the RH bill.” Apparently, organizers were hoping that if enough “warm bodies” showed up, it would intimidate enough officials, starting with P-Noy and especially the politically vulnerable legislators, into abandoning the measure.
This may have been true in previous years. But I sense a greater force of will among our legislators, who have become increasingly outspoken in their support for reproductive health, and a greater realization of the growing toll on people’s health—and allied concerns such as housing, education, employment, transportation, income distribution and overall development—brought on by unchecked population growth.
And you don’t even have to take just my word for it. Recently, the Human Development Cluster of the Cabinet, composed of 20 or so agencies, issued a statement in support of the RH bill, saying that it is “deeply concerned with the long-term implications of the absence of such a bill … on poverty and development in this country.”
The statement cites the jump in our maternal mortality rate—to the present 221 per 100,000 live births (about or more than 12 maternal deaths a day). In addition, it said, “we now have the worst poverty situation in the entire Asean region, and, with one of the highest birth rates in Southeast Asia, the dubious distinction of being the 12th most populous country in the world.”
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WHAT makes the situation even more heartbreaking is that it is poor women (and their poor partners) who bear the brunt of the consequences of this lack of access to health care services. Filipinos in the upper classes can already freely decide the size of their families, having just two or three children.
But poor women end up with two or three MORE children than they planned for. According to the Cluster statement, “44 percent (or nearly half) of the pregnancies of the poorest 10 percent of Filipino women are unwanted. [Some] 22 percent of these women hope to avoid pregnancies but do not use family planning; and at least 41 percent do not use any contraceptives at all.” Indeed, it is estimated that the birth rate of the poorest 20 percent is roughly double that of the national average.
Like marketers of penis enlargers, those against RH refuse to see the faces and the suffering of our women.
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