Category: abortion

mo & RHian

i didn’t even “know” rhian ramos before the sh*t hit the fan; these showbiz girls all look the same to me.  but mo twister i couldn’t help noticing from the first because he speaks perfect english and is simpatiko naman, reminded me of martin nievera in MAD days.

that they were a couple pala i only found out when a few facebook friends posted mo-rhian related statuses.  in fairness, no one posted the video, or link, unless i missed it lang, which still means it wasn’t being posted all over the place.  which led curious me to pep.ph to get the gist and find out the latest — to wit, the video was recorded by mo while in singapore, crying over his girlfriend’s abortion against his wishes, which video was released on the internet by unidentified ones, which has led to apologies from mo, but no denials from rhian, only complaints of what-sounds-like emotional battering.

meanwhile, elizabeth angsiaco was tweeting like mad from the senate as filibustering on the RH bill proceeded and senator tito sotto had the floor again and was again discoursing on RH as in-aid-of-abortion or something as disputable.  which led me to post this status:

the mo & rhian story, in the context of RH debates in congress, is HOT.  interesting that nothing much is being said in social media in defense (or offense) of either mo or rhian.  one would think that the pro-life would be taking mo’s side, and the pro-choice, rhian’s.  but it’s more complicated than that, ‘no? … yung pro-RH naman natin ay hindi all-out pro-choice

commented orlando roncesvalles, a virtual friend and fellow blogger:

this is a difficult issue.  “choice” in “pro-choice” is a crime in PH so long as the courts define a conceived fetus as a natural person.  if i remember, roe v. wade turned in part on texas common law that a non-viable fetus was not yet a human being.

and yet abortion, a mortal sin acc to the church, a crime acc to ph law, happens everyday around here.  we all know someone who has resorted to it for one reason or another at one time or another.

the silence, including the legislators’, on this particular allegation of abortion, though not unexpected, is intriguing.  is it to spare the girl, whom it would seem we don’t want to condemn because the guy has punished her enough?  or are we giving her the benefit of the doubt since she has yet to confirm or deny?  (ako, i’m eagerly awaiting her lawyer lorna kapunan’s defense strategy: admit or deny or dedma.)

but more than anything, the silence reflects on the RH bill:  it seeks to address the needs only of poor women who have no access to info re birth control and/or contraceptive methods and devices, and who therefore, in many cases, resort to abortion.  this is really also to say that women who are educated and well-to-do need no help and don’t resort to abortion.

in fact the only difference between poor and rich women in this country of macho moralists who have no respect for women’s rights is that poor women have only hilots and sleazy clinics to run to where methods are crude and painful and life-threatening, while rich women have access to expensive facilities and safe and painless procedures, here and abroad.

says philstar‘s cito beltran:

…lets face the facts, ABORTIONS have been happening in this country, in schools, colleges and universities from the fifties, all up to today. Some women were forced to do it by their partner or by social pressure, or fear. But I also know of young women who had abortions because pregnancy would ruin their careers or their life. Men have been party to them or have been opposed to them but could not stop them.

We are a nation that has lived with this generational lie, we are a society that has opted to live in denial and ignorance rather than do something educated, civilized and Godly about pre-marital sex, about sex education and most especially about unwanted pregnancy. And while factions were fighting as they do today, the killing of unwanted babies continued.

yes, it’s time to face facts.

simbang gabi RH blues

to get in the christmas mood, for a change, nagsisimbang gabi kami ni katrina.   the first dawn we went to st. francis church along shaw blvd., a three-minute drive from the house.   the big church was full, all seats taken, standing room only for many late-comers.

to our dismay, merong pre-mass video about RH, complete with a hillary clinton clip equating RH with abortion.   the audio was bad, and i was glad.  (i wondered if this was regular sunday fare too.)

worse, during the looooong sermon, mga kalahating oras yata yon, at least five maybe ten minutes were devoted to the evils of RH na, sabi daw mismo ni first lady hillary clinton, is the same thing as abortion,  all in the context of na contrary to isaiah the prophet’s admonition to “observe what is right, and do what is just”.

nagpanting ang tenga ko.   naalaala ko tuloy si carlos celdran.   sayang wala akong placard saying, it’s a lie!   as if.   di ko naman type na umeksena.   thought of walking out instead but it didn’t feel like the right thing to do.   we wanted to finish the mass more than to make a statement.

over breakfast we wondered if we should find another church.   a friend said it might be the same in all parish churches, on order of the bishops.   we decided to give st. francis another chance, maybe it would be another priest, maybe it would be another kind of sermon.

hayy.   no such luck.   same priest.   again, this time in the context of joseph’s genealogy, the long string of “begats” tracing his ancestry to abraham, ipinasok na naman ang RH=abortion.   this time naalala ko my parents, regular churchgoers all their lives.   they would have been so shocked and scandalized to hear such talk in a church, during mass.   my ears shut down, my mind wandered, wondering where to next.

day 3 we tried christ the king in green meadows.   smaller church, sosyal neighborhood, a 10-15 minute drive away.   hallelujah.   no pre-mass RH=abortion video.   no talk of RH=abortion in the sermon which took 10 minutes or so.   on the story of joseph agonizing over what to do when he found out that the virgin mary was pregnant with a child not his, until he was visited in a dream by an angel who told him that the child had been conceived through the holy spirit and to call him jesus.   the sermon likened joseph’s travails to what we all go through in life, both dark times and good times, and the choices we all have to make, na naikonekt rin niya sa poverty and ofws.   good job.

i can only imagine how the st.francis priest used joseph’s story to again push the RH=abortion line lie.   i’m glad i wasn’t there to hear it.   thank god for christ the king!

RH hurrahs! and a boo

the first HURRAH! is for dr. sylvia claudio, director of the u.p. center for women’s studies, who spoke up in congress at the 2nd deliberation of the house committee of population and family relations on the critical question of when life begins, and fearlessly unequivocally contradicted the notion that life begins at fertilization.

I have a prepared statement today but let me respond to the questions posed to the medical doctors by Representatives Biazon and (Anthony) Golez on the issue of when life begins.

I note that the Chair called upon me because Rep. Biazon also asked who does not believe life begins at fertilization. I do not, for two reasons. The first reason is that as an agnostic I do not subscribe to the beliefs of the Catholic Church. In this regard I would like to remind everyone that the Constitutional provision on religious freedom protects not just the right to belief but also the right to non-belief. …

The second reason I do not believe that life begins at fertilization has to do with my expertise as a medical doctor. . . . I would like to note that “conception” is not a medical term. The terms fertilization and implantation are medical terms and we can describe and explain these processes to lay people. Any scientific discussion requires the precise use of terms. The Philippine Obstetrics and Gynecological Society is correct when it states that the mainstream medical and scientific community agrees that pregnancy begins at implantation.

the second HURRAH! is for dr. marita v.t. reyes, chair of the women’s health care foundation, who recently gave a talk on “Biomedical Ethics and RH” in a u.p. forum. reyes points out that only upon implantation does the woman’s urine test positive for the hormone that signals a pregnancy.

Conception is usually equated with fertilization described as the union of sperm and egg. Clinically, however,conception is synonymous with pregnancy and is established by a pregnancy test based on the presence of the human chorionic gonadotrophin in the blood and the urine. This hormone is secreted by the chorionic villi after implantation of the embryo.

… Implantation is completed 14 days (2 weeks) after fertilization. Studies have shown that 45-70 percent of fertilized ova do not successfully implant. It is after implantation that individuation may be said to occur since twinning and fusion no longer take place. Some books refer to the fertilized ovum prior to implantation as a ‘pre-embryo.’ After implantation, it is referred to as ‘an embryo.’ Sometimes, debates are unresolved because of differences in terminologies! It is at implantation that the hormone, human chorionic gonadotrophin mentioned earlier, is secreted and is used as an indicator of pregnancy.

so there.   as far as these lady scientists are concerned, human life begins with implantation, which doesn’t happen until more than a week after fertilization, if at all there is an egg that is fertilized after unprotected (uncontracepted?) sex.   so what’s the harm of emergency contraception, or the morning-after pill, when one is not pregnant and just wants to make sure one does not get pregnant?

of course the anti-RH folks will insist that life begins with fertilization and any intervention in the reproductive process is morally wrong.   i say again, it’s for the woman to decide who to believe and what to do with her own body.

of course it would help if mainstream media would level-up the information-gathering, yes?   and lead discussions that would help women understand that they have options, and that would make the golezes and sottos in congress see that millions of impoverished men and women who may want to practice contraception (instead of having to resort to abortion) just can’t afford to buy condoms and pills when they can barely feed their families three meals a day.

this brings me to the BIG BOO! which goes to anc‘s the brew that guested paranaque representative roilo golez the other thursday but instead of truly grilling him on his anti-RH stance, the brewhas just let him go on and on — high population is good, contraceptives are already available, maternal deaths should be blamed on lack of doctors and midwives, at kung ano-ano pang kamachohan.   they should have posted a disclaimer: the opinions expressed herein are not those of the brewhas, or the network’s, unless of course anti-RH din pala sila.

sure they tried, pitifully unsuccessfully, to bring the talk to the level of the impoverished family, but golez was just too “good” — poor din daw siya noon but his parents had the right values, sent him to school, blah blah blah.   hay naku.   so the brewhas changed the subject na lang:  how daw kaya to produce more pacquiaos.

like i posted in facebook, the girls didn’t help the RH cause any.   they should stick to trivial issues for which knee-jerk reactions are good enough if they can’t be bothered to do their homework.   if they had bothered to check out golez’s website they could have at least maybe prepared an intelligent counter-attack.   or maybe not?

in last thursday’s episode the brewhas reacted to criticisms lightly, patawa effect — kesyo they didn’t wanna “mess with golez”…  he will “stoop to nothing”…   kesyo  it wasn’t supposed to be a debate, nothing wrong with letting the “charming” golez have his say…  maiba naman from “shrewish zealots” with “magical reasoning”…   ganoon?   ewww

so what do we make of one brewha’s  rant vs. tibaks and the suc budget protests.   i guess matapang lang sila vs. the left at pag di nila kaharap?   ‘yan ba ang girl power, anc style?   BOO!

abortion

it’s something women don’t really talk about, even among themselves, but if one needs that kind of help, it’s not hard to find out where to go, depending on one’s paying capacity.   there are crude back-alley operations (catheter style, the unsafest unkindest scariest), there are clandestine clinics (d & c, pain pain pain), there are even small hospitals (suction, painless, relatively).    also there are meds, pharmaceuticals, banned here of course but widely known about even in the provinces and can be had under the counter, or in quiapo, requiring little medical supervision.   but elizabeth angsioco is right, it is never an easy decision, rather always an agonizing one, and always out of desperation.   poor women.

The ‘A’ word
Elizabeth Angsioco

A stands for abortion.

Five hundred seventy thousand Filipino women underwent induced abortions in 2008. Around 90,000 of them were hospitalized, and 1,000 died from complications. Surely, these abortion figures (Guttmacher Institute) should be more than enough to shock people. But will these make us closely look at the problem? More importantly, will these data jolt the government into action? Or will we be like the moralists whose knee-jerk reactions are to condemn women and brush these numbers aside as untrue?

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines. The Constitution criminalizes it. Because it is also culturally taboo, abortion is rarely discussed and done mostly within the context of religion or morality – that abortion is a mortal sin. Opportunities to objectively, honestly and intelligently dialogue on abortion is severely lacking. There is virtually no venue for women to freely discuss abortion without the moral prescriptions and judgment from others. Because it is illegal and stigmatized, abortion remains hidden; the data are hard to come by.

Admittedly, the above-mentioned numbers are estimates. These are, however, intelligent estimates, and the result of a rigorous process of research and data extrapolation based on factors used in comparative estimations in other countries. Thus, these figures cannot and should not be disregarded as untrue.

These numbers show how critical and widespread the problem is. Despite its being illegal, more than half a million women undergo abortion a year. This is more than the entire population of Makati City in 2007. The number of women who are hospitalized as a result of the abortion is a few thousands more than Isabela City’s population. The number of women who died is comparable to the population of an entire small barangay. Such is the magnitude of the problem.

Abortions are performed clandestinely. In many cases, unsafe manners are used by those who perform them. They endanger women’s lives. There were cases of women who used barbecue sticks and clothes hangers to induce abortion. Highly dangerous ways such as these are more common for poor women. Their rich ‘sisters’ can pay for needed services, sometimes even getting the procedure (and vacation) in another country.

Profiling women having induced abortions will reveal that 68 percent are poor, 91 percent are married/in union, 57 percent have more than three children and 87 percent are Catholics.

When asked why they resorted to abortion, 72 percent cited poverty, 54 percent said they already had enough children, and 57 percent indicated that the pregnancy occurred too soon after the last one.

Therefore, contrary to popular notion that those who have abortions are young women who sleep around, the reality is that it is the poor, Catholic married women with several children who are forced into this situation. Moreover, it is clear from the women’s reasons that their pregnancies were unplanned or unwanted. Fifty-four percent of those who had abortion were not using any contraceptive when they got pregnant. Of those who were doing family planning, 75 percent were using a traditional method.

In my decades of working with community women, I have yet to meet one who is pro-abortion but have encountered many who said they had to resort to it out of desperation. Deciding to have an abortion is never easy. Women agonize over this and in most cases, make the decision not for themselves but for their families, especially the several children they already have.

Take D, for example. Now 48 years old and an ambulant vendor, she gave birth to her first child at 17 and was pregnant each year for the next five years. Thus, at the age of 22, she already had six children. A devout Catholic, D. had three abortions after her sixth child because her husband would not hear of pills when they could hardly provide food for their children. She said that the abortions saved her six living children. After, she decided to take the pill and only told her husband five years later. She now says that without the abortions and pills, she could have given birth to at least six more children, something that they definitely could not afford.

T also had an abortion. She and her husband used to work in the same factory but her man was retrenched and became seriously ill. T became the sole breadwinner and then she got pregnant. With four children, high medical costs for the husband, no savings and only her meager earnings to tide the family over, the couple knew that it was the worst time to have another child. They decided that an abortion was the only solution.

While invisible, women having abortions are real women with real stories to tell. Unfortunately, society seems uninterested.

In fact, the abortion scare is used by the Catholic hierarchy and its fundamentalist allies against the reproductive health bill. Virtually all anti-RH positions equate the bill with abortion. Particularly, the FP provisions are under attack. Let’s look at what House Bill 96 (Lagman) actually says.

Section 3, i. states that, “While nothing in this Act changes the law against abortion, the government shall ensure that all women needing care for post-abortion complications shall be treated and counselled in a humane, non-judgmental and compassionate manner.” Clearly therefore, the RH bill does not promote abortion’s legalization but takes serious notice of and addresses abusive treatment suffered by poor women in the hands of medical practitioners even when these women are already suffering from complications.

The same section says that government shall promote, without bias, all modern natural and artificial, medically safe, legal, and effective family planning methods. The bill has related provisions that ensure access to family planning of those who need the services the most – those in poverty. Note that the unmet need for family planning of poorest women is 51 percent and; those who are not poor need much less. (National Demographic and Health Survey, 2008).

Addressing abortion necessitates dealing with unplanned, mistimed and unwanted pregnancies. Access to family planning programs is a must. Studies show that correct and regular use of contraceptives can bring down abortion rates by as much as 85 percent (Allan Guttmacher Institute). Therefore, contrary to what anti-RH groups say, the bill’s passage will bring down the number of induced abortions in the country.

Anti-abortion groups should actually support the reproductive health bill.