Denying Women’s Reproductive Rights: An Executive Privilege or Human Rights Abuse?

By Perla Aragon-Choudhury
Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project

MANILA — What happens when women are too poor to pay for their own contraceptive supplies and long for the government to step in an offer simple support for an operation that would stop their unwanted pregnancies and enable them to take control of their lives?

The answer is perhaps Ma. Victoria Pesimo, 30, one of 20 petitioners launching a suit against the government and the Manila City authorities who spoke out at the Forum For Family Planning and Development (FFPD) event here in January in Quezon City.

She carried her youngest baby, two-year-old Adrian, in her arms as she told listeners her story and how she and others were trying to change the law as a result.

Pesimo told the forum she had been denied contraceptive pills at the health center in her neighborhood because of Executive Order No. 003 issued by Former Manila mayor Jose L. Atienza, Jr.

Because the order encourages natural family planning and has not been rescinded, it has impacted negatively on Pesimo, who does not have any money to buy condoms. Nor could she afford to pay for ligation– a simple gynecological operation to prevent pregnancies. The family is dependent on her husband who is a seasonal construction worker without a steady job and so money is scarce enough as it is and barely enough to feed them.

Former civil servant Benjamin de Leon, now executive director of the FFPD is insistent that the government has to do more. “Family planning saves lives,” he says, and the poor will benefit if the government steps in to help. He was speaking at the 22nd Usapang POPDEV (Talks on Population and Development) forum last February 18 in Quezon City.

Pesimo explained how she was daunted by the cost of ligation offered at the Philippine General Hospital and had to go to Malabon where she heard that a health advocacy and services group Likhaan offered ligation.

Also speaking at the 22nd Usapang POPDEV, Dr. Junice Melgar, executive director of Likhaan, echoed De Leon’s complaint and argued it “was the obligation of the government to protect reproductive health rights and to make services available as a matter of human rights.”

“The Philippines,” Melgar claims, “is one of 60 countries where 4,000 women die each year through complications in giving birth.”

Just last week, the UN formerly requested the Philippines to improve its record on its mortality in childbirth.

According to Clara Rita Padilla, a lawyer and executive director of EnGendeRights, Inc., Pesimo is only one of countless poor women in Manila affected by the executive order. Poor women of childbearing age have taken “the brunt of former Mayor Atienza’s policy,” she says.

Padilla recalled asking the Family Planning Services of the Manila Health Department “for a measly PhP 5,250 (USD 112)” to provide medicines for 35 women who wanted to undergo ligation only to be told the department did not have the funds. “These are clear incidents of denial of women’s access to reproductive health care,” she says.

Padilla adds: “There were also many adolescents who started childbearing at 14-18 years of age and then continued childbearing successively. I have interviewed a 21-year old adolescent who had no access to sex education; no access to reproductive health education, no information and no services – and now she has six children: At 21!”

Hopes for change?

Unfortunately, the plight of Pesimo and those like her did not end when Alfredo Lim succeeded Atienza in 2007 and was reelected mayor.