Birth Control Underground in the Philippines
Thu Apr 24, 2008 at 11:30:56 AM PDT
There was much press coverage this past week on Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to the United States, including a massive mass at Yankee Stadium. But the Washington Post recently highlighted a sad part of the Catholic Church's agenda keeping many Filipinas in poverty: its visceral opposition to birth control.
There are many reasons why this country is poor, including feudal patterns of land ownership and corrupt government. But there is a compelling link between family size and poverty. It increases in lock step with the number of children, as nutrition, health, education and job prospects all decline, government statistics and many studies show.
Birth and poverty rates here are among the highest in Asia. And the Philippines, where four out of five of the country's 91 million people are Roman Catholic, also stands out in Asia for its government's rejection of modern contraception as part of family planning.
Acceding to Catholic doctrine, the government for the past five years has supported only what it calls "natural" family planning. No national government funds can be used to buy contraceptives for the poor, although anyone who can afford them is permitted to buy them. Local governments can also buy and distribute contraceptives, but many lack the money...
"Family planning helps reduce poverty," President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said in a 2003 speech that detailed her approach to birth control. But she said then and has since insisted that the government would support only family planning methods acceptable to the Catholic Church.
Interestingly, Arroyo has admitted to using birth control pills in the past. But she confessed to a priest so all is forgiven.
What is unforgivable are the conditions some of her fellow patriots must live because of her policies. Women like Maria Susana Espinoza who lives with her husband and four children in a squatter's hut in "a vast, stinking garbage dump by Manila Bay," according to the Washington Post. Espinoza recently encountered health workers at the garbage dump and is about to get an IUD device on the down low.
The organization that is helping Espinoza agreed to introduce this reporter to her on condition that it not be named. The group's health workers said they fear retaliation and harassment from officials in the national and city government, as well as from the Catholic Church.
In 2005, Catholic bishops in the southern Philippines announced that they would refuse Communion to government health workers who distributed birth control devices.
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines maintains that birth control has broken up families because it allows for people to have extramarital affairs and get abortions. Okay.
But as economists quoted by WaPo point out, its next door neighbor, Thailand, was able to reduce birthrates -- and poverty -- by dispensing birth control to the poor.
"Even when there is widespread corruption, insurgent violence and other powerful reasons for poverty, the evidence from across Asia is that good population policy by itself contributes to significant poverty reduction," said Ernesto M. Pernia, professor of economics at the University of the Philippines.
The silver lining in this depressing story is public opinion surveys do show that about 90 percent of Filipinos support government funding of contraceptives for people who can't afford them. Surveys have also found that poor families have significantly more unwanted pregnancies than richer families and a harder time getting birth control, according to WaPo.
Now, if only the old guys at the church hierarchy would agree...
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