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Under the Influence of the Bishops
The Battle Over Family Planning in the Philippines
It is a measure that has been, in one form or another, on the
legislative agenda since the 1980s,
but has never gone further than
committee level. The measure went
farthest and was being deliberated on
the floor of the House early this year,
just before Congress went into recess in
preparation for the May elections. House
Bill 5043 had hurdled the committee deliberations
and was in the period of interpellation
(when a bill’s sponsor takes
questions from colleagues) but had been
stalled for months by a small band of
interrogators who, failing to shake the
sponsors, resorted to questioning the
quorum and demanding a roll call. At
this point, the Catholic Bishops Conference
of the Philippines (CBCP) even issued
a call for members of Congress not to
report for sessions when the “RH Bill”
was tabled.
“It [the quorum issue] was a convenient
tool” to delay the bill’s passage, sighs
Ramon San Pascual, executive director
of the Philippine Legislators’ Committee
for Population and Development,
founded in the 1980s to promote the study
of population and development issues
among members of both the House and Senate. Indeed, says Rep. Edcel Lagman,
the bill’s principal author, the use of a
quorum “was a lesson for us,” because,
he says, if only all of the bill’s co-authors
showed up at sessions, there would indeed
have been a quorum.
But quorum or no quorum, it seems the RH Bill was doomed from the start. In hindsight, it appears that the leadership of the House, in the person of former Speaker Prospero Nograles, was ambivalent at best about supporting the passage of the bill. Part of that ambivalence must be credited to Nograles’s deference to the former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who had already declared it state policy to promote only “natural” family planning, a position many believed was a concession to the bishops, on whose political support she relied.
In a conversation with Speaker
Nograles, recalls Lagman, “he told me
that he was for the bill, but he admitted
that if he got a call from Malacanang
[the president’s official residence] to slow
down, he would not be able to resist.”
Before then, irked by the opponents’ delaying tactics, Lagman managed to wrangle from Nograles an agreement to hold a panel debate, forming two panels of five members each to discuss possible amendments to the bill. This would have negated the need for any more fruitless and contentious floor debates. “That never happened,” he says ruefully.
San Pascual is more blunt. The Speaker, he says, “made it appear as if he were on our side, when all the while he was really on the other side.” (During his unsuccessful run this year for mayor of his native Davao City, Nograles declared his intention to withdraw the city’s Women’s Health Code and received an award from Human Life International, one of the more strident opponents of sexual and reproductive rights worldwide.)
In October last year, just as the panel debate was being readied, sources from within Malacanang confirmed that two bishops, representing the bishops Commission on Family Life, called on the president. Shortly after, an assistant of the president called up Speaker Nograles asking him to “slow down” on the RH Bill. “After that, they were just dribbling the ball and going through the motions,” says Rep. Janette Garin of the province of Iloilo, a bill co-sponsor who was outspoken in her support for it.
The “Golden Age” of reproductive
health policy in the Philippines, says Dr.
Junice Demeterio Melgar, executive
director of women’s ngo Likhaan, was
during a five-year period, from 1995 to
2000, that straddled the administrations
of former Presidents Fidel V. Ramos and
Joseph Estrada.
Ramos, a Protestant, had appointed
as Health Secretary Dr. Juan Flavier,
who brought a folksy winning charm to
his advocacy for family planning and
reproductive health. During the midterm
elections of 1995, Flavier ran for
the Senate and his deputy Dr. Carmencita
“Chit” Reodica eventually took over the
doh. It was Dr. Reodica, head of the
Philippine delegation to the International
Conference on Population and
Development in Cairo, who crafted the policy grounding the department’s
programs on “10 elements” of reproductive
health, including free and informed
choice in family planning, information
and education for adolescents and a
program on violence against women.
After Estrada’s electoral victory in
1998, Dr. Alberto “Cuasi” Romualdez,
a public health expert who had gained
a reputation in international health
circles, was appointed health secretary.
And while Estrada joked about “not
being around if my mother had practiced
family planning,” he largely left
Romualdez alone to pursue his
programs. But Estrada’s term was cut
short by a show of “People Power” in
2001, detained under house arrest on
charges of plunder.
When Estrada’s Vice-president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took office, Melgar notes, there was a “swift reversal” of policies governing family planning. The first warning, she recalls, was the “surreptitious” de-listing of Postinor, a drug brand approved for use as emergency contraception by Romualdez’s DOH. It was to be used by the women’s units in government hospitals for survivors of domestic violence and rape.
It was around this time that women’s groups held a dialogue with President Arroyo, recalls Melgar. At this meeting, the president admitted that she had relied on the birth control pill to space the births of her three children. “But I know better now,” she was quoted by the media, and in what it is hoped was an attempt at humor, blamed the pill for her notoriously short temper.
In the nine years of Arroyo’s term (she ran and won in 2004 in what has been revealed as a fraudulent election), she has steadily eroded the gains made in previous years. Declaring her belief in “devolution,” the president ordered that responsibility for the delivery of health services, including family planning, be given to local government units, with no national funds allotted for the purchase of family planning commodities. (But she allowed an allotment of ₱50 million [about $1 million] to the conservative Catholic group Couples for Christ, for the promotion of natural family planning.)
In a recent study, “Facts on Barriers
to Contraceptive Use in the Philippines,”
Likhaan and the Guttmacher Institute
traced the “leveling off of modern contraceptive
use” among Filipino women
mainly to lack of access, especially of
family planning supplies. Local governments,
said the authors, “do not receive
sufficient funds under the revenue-sharing
scheme to fully meet” their responsibility.
Increasingly, women rely on private
drug stores for their family planning
needs, as a result of which women in the
poorest sector are having on average two
more children than they wanted. The
study says that if only the “unmet need”
for family planning was addressed, there
would be 1.6 million fewer pregnancies
each year, and unintended births would
be reduced by 800,000, abortions would
decline by 500,000 and miscarriages
would decline by 200,000.
“Bruising” is a term that supporters
and authors of the RH Bill use to describe
the fight to get it passed. Previous efforts
had usually ended up mired in endless
committee hearings, such as when one
bill was referred to the budget committee
and died without seeing daylight. But
champions persisted in pursuing the bill,
noting that instead of being at the mercy
of the executive’s personal and political
stance, the population program needed
to be “protected” by legislation.
The authorship by Congressman
Lagman of a version of the RH Bill was
both unexpected and heartening, says
Melgar, whose group is a member of
the Reproductive Health Action Network
(rhan), which lobbied vigorously for
the measure.
Lagman has been a legislator since the 1980s, a lawyer whose two brothers have died as a result of leftist involvement. He was better known for advocating such “reckless” causes as debt moratorium, abolition of the death penalty and criminalization of forced disappearances. At the same time, Lagman proved himself a reliable ally of President Arroyo and the ruling party. At the time he filed the bill, he was chair of the committee on appropriations, using this post to win the support of many grateful congressmen.
In terms of number of sponsors alone, the RH Bill had good chances of passage, with 132 legislators (out of more than 200) signing on. Last year, Lagman also informed the president that he was giving up his chairmanship of appropriations to devote his full attention to the RH Bill. “She said, ‘Edcel go ahead,’” the congressman recalls, and he left believing he had at least Arroyo’s implicit support.
Both sides of the debate marshaled
their supporters to attend the public hearings
on the RH Bill: nuns, priests and
seminarians (in clerical garb) faced off
against community women. Business
groups, believing in the need for a rational
population program, took out full-page
advertisements in newspapers supporting
the measure. Banners were hung in front
of churches denouncing the “abortion
bill.” Women’s groups held a march of
pregnant women to focus attention on
maternal health. And in the meantime,
bishops summoned congressmen and congresswomen to berate them for their support of the bill.
Astonishingly, despite a few withdrawals, the sponsors held fast. But Lagman could do nothing about the lack of a quorum; by late 2009 legislators preferred spending more time in their districts, preparing for the next year’s campaign.
“Even if we failed (to pass the bill),
we were able to generate public acceptance
of reproductive health and rights
issues, and the links between pregnancy,
maternal health and women’s rights,”
reflects Melgar. But the battle for the
bill just proved, she adds, “how powerful
the executive can be.”
Public support not just for the RH
Bill but for family planning itself has
long been demonstrated by public opinion
surveys. The latest poll, conducted by
the firm Pulse Asia last February at the
height of the campaign season, revealed
that 64 percent of Filipinos would vote
for candidates who publicly promote
modern methods of family planning. The
same survey found that 75 percent think it is “very important or important for a
candidate to include family planning in
his/her program of action,” while 87
percent said that it is important for the
government to allocate a budget for family
planning. And in Catholic Philippines,
51 percent said they do not believe that
using modern methods of family planning
is a sin.
The new president, known popularly
as “Noynoy,” has made known his support for an RH measure, although
he was accused of “flip-flopping” on the
issue when he had to clarify a previous
statement and note that he wasn’t an
author of the Senate version of the RH
Bill. The bishops had publicly declared
their disapproval of Noynoy over his
stance on reproductive health (he said
he believed in giving and respecting
couples’ choices). Towards the end of
the campaign period, the bishops even
held an elaborate “laying of hands” ceremony
on two of his opponents who
promised not to sign an RH Bill during
their term. They were Senator Manuel
Villar (who finished third after Aquino and Estrada) and city councilor JC de
los Reyes (who finished last).
Lagman, who is vying for speaker and,
should he lose, would end up as minority
leader, still an influential position, filed
a new bill as soon as the new Congress
convened. He is also optimistic of its
chances of passage, citing that most coauthors
won their races handily and that
known supporters would also be returning
to the House. But Arroyo surprised everyone early this year when she
announced that she would be running
for Congress and is now a representative
of her native province of Pampanga.
It’s anybody’s guess what she would do,
given her residual influence, for or against
the passage of a reproductive health
measure. Also, most observers concede
that Villar, who is returning to the Senate,
has the numbers to re-take his post as
Senate president.
So perhaps Lagman and his supporters should take to heart the admonition that when it comes to the RH Bill, they should “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
Rina Jiminez-David is a journalist and opinion columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Her book, “Women at Large,” was a finalist for the National Book Awards in 1994. She has been recognized for her reporting on population, development and the Catholic faith.