In celebration of Women’s Month, the municipality of Valencia focused on the still-embattled issue of reproductive health during two days of reflection, discussion and planning. The activities brought together local officials, health service providers, women’s organizations, and women’s rights advocates.
Providing data, reflections on issues, and updates on the national situation was the executive director of Catholics for Reproductive Health (C4RH), Frances Luz Chua, with a nearly two decade record as a women’s rights and reproductive health activist.
Many people know that the struggle to get a law passed on this issue took 13 years (where in other countries, everything contained in the law is a normal part of mainstream education and health services.)
Conservative Catholic forces opposed any and all forms of a possible law at every turn. With the result that in the absence of good education and appropriate health services, population growth, teen pregnancies, maternal and child mortality rates, sexually- transmitted infections, abortions resorted to because of lack of access to family planning all reached alarming levels. The data was simply shocking.
Concern over this intolerable situation, and with how women’s lives were being blighted led to women, and also men, from all over the country mobilizing, organizing, writing, speaking out, rallying, lobbying – tirelessly for over a decade.
Not just a grassroots movement, distinguished public officials and other national figures took leading roles.
But the opponents went for low and ugly tactics, demonizing those advancing the idea of reproductive health, calling the advocates’ morality into question (a Negros Oriental politician likened the women advocates to prostitutes), accusing them of promoting a “culture of death,” when in fact, it was the true flourishing of life, with safety, good health, respect for women, optimum conditions for children and families that lay at the heart of the reproductive health advocacy.
Stung by these accusations, in 2011, advocates who held firm to their Catholic faith established C4RH. They wanted to express that as Christians and as Catholics, they felt it a duty to care for themselves, their families, for all Filipinos who needed reproductive health education and services, and especially for the poorest sectors of society already experiencing intolerable burdens, deprivations and suffering.
They were also encouraged in this by Catholic priests who privately expressed that Catholics had the right to exercise discernment in choosing what was best for their families, and who ultimately believed in the primacy of conscience.
C4RH continues to be active, along with other pro-reproductive health forces because the struggle is far from over. No sooner was the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act passed at the end of 2012 when the conservative lobby stopped it in its tracks by securing a status quo ante that limited Department of Health programs and services to what they were before the law was passed.
The provisions of the new law could, therefore, not be implemented. Then the law’s constitutionally was challenged but when in 2014 the Supreme Court declared it constitutional, some provisions were weakened. In 2015, an effective contraceptive implant became the object of a restraining order, and in 2016, all contraceptive commodities were questioned as being abortifacient, and needing review and certification, a lengthy process.
In short, conservatives are employing all manner of delaying and blocking tactics to deprive Filipinos of much-needed health services, unmindful and apparently uncaring about the added suffering of women, children, men, and families, especially of the poorest and neediest among us.
Catholics for Reproductive Health continue to commit to working for the full implementation of a good law, with the deep conviction that their action is an expression of their Christian faith.
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Author’s email: h.cecilia7@gmail.com
