RH law takes effect; too late for mother of 22
Reproductive Health Bill (RH)
A historic birth control law that took effect Thursday after years of opposition from the Catholic Church came too late for Rosalie Cabenan, a housewife who has given birth 22 times.
Frail, with a leathery face streaked with wrinkles, the 48-year-old Cabenan suffers from untreated gallstones and constant fatigue because her body has never had the time to properly recover from her successive pregnancies.
THE BABIES KEPT COMING Rosalie Cabenan shows a photo of some of her children on Thursday. AFP PHOTO
“We only wanted three children. But they kept coming and coming,” Cabenan told AFP this week at her ramshackle home in Baseco, a massive slum in Tondo, Manila, where more than 60,000 people compete for space.
“I was always pregnant and there was no time to take care of myself because I had to keep working to help my husband feed the children. I have tried everything, a stevedore (dock worker), a laundry woman, fish monger and a vegetable seller,” she said.
Mother at 14
Cabenan had her first child when she was just 14. When she nearly died giving birth to her youngest, who is now six, she finally abandoned the demands of the Church to not use contraceptives.
A devout Catholic who still goes to mass twice a week, Cabenan nevertheless regrets following the Church dogma so strictly and said she welcomed the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 that officially took effect Thursday.
“I tell women now, please do not be like me. I have too many children, and sometimes I do not know what to do and just cry, especially when they fight,” she said.
Rosalie Cabenan, second left with her husband Danilo, left, pose with some of their children at their home in Manila.JAY DIRECTO / AFP PHOTO
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She said nobody taught her proper family planning methods and there was no easy access to free contraceptives in Baseco.
Cabenan met her husband, Danilo, when she was in high school, and he, a struggling teenage dockworker in Manila's tough port area.
She soon dropped out of school to be with Danilo, now 50, in a union that quickly resulted in successive births that dashed her ambition of one day becoming a teacher.
"It is very difficult to have many children ... many times we sleep without eating," she said.
Cabenan also mixes up her children's names and birthdays.
But she said the most difficult and painful part was failing to provide basic medical care to her children.
Of the 22, five died young due to diarrhea, a treatable disease that constantly plagues the slums, because they had no money to buy medicines or take them to hospital.
Six of the surviving 17 children are males, the rest are females.
Six of the eldest are either married or have children out of wedlock -- and nearly all of them squeeze in a house cobbled together from bricks, driftwood and tarpaulin that is the size of a small garage.
Cabenan said most of her children were delivered at home by midwives, although one was born on a bus and another by a roadside with the help of passersby.
Her husband has no permanent job and finds construction work anywhere he can. Only three of the children are studying. None of the older ones were able to finish high school.
"If we had this law in the past, maybe we would have had a better life today," she said.
Although the law took effect as of Thursday, Hazel Chua, an official at the Department of Health’s family planning unit, said they were still preparing implementing rules and regulations, which will only be released in April.
Under the law, government health centers will have to have a supply of contraceptives, unlike in the past when local mayors could be intimidated by the Church into not providing birth control services, she said.
Sex education
The law requires government health centers to hand out free condoms and birth control pills, benefiting tens of millions of the country’s poor who would not otherwise be able to afford or have access to them.
It also mandates that sex education be taught in schools and public health workers receive family planning training, while post-abortion medical care has been made legal for the first time.
Proponents say the law will slow the country’s rapid population growth, cut widespread poverty and reduce the number of mothers dying at childbirth.
“This is a triumph for poor women and girls who would otherwise have no access to these things,” said the United Nations Population Fund’s country representative, Ugochi Daniels.
The Philippines has one of the highest birth rates in the world—3.1 for every woman—and the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Asia-Pacific, according to the medical charity group Merlin.
The Catholic Church, which counts 80 percent of the Philippines’ 100 million people as its followers, had for more than a decade successfully lobbied and intimidated politicians into blocking probirth control bills in Congress.
However President Aquino, a bachelor who is one of the most popular leaders in the country’s history, used his political capital to defy the Church and help steer the reproductive health bill through Congress last year.
The Church, which disallows the use of artificial contraceptives, has continued to resist, warning prolife politicians they will be targeted in midterm elections this year and backing various groups’ legal challenges to the law.
Catholic groups have shifted the battle to the courts, filing petitions with the Supreme Court questioning the law’s constitutionality.
The law’s chief author, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, said he was confident the high court would uphold the change.
Asked to comment on the plight of Cabenan, one of the groups that filed a petition with Supreme Court said her 22 children should be a cause for celebration and not regret.
“Children are never a liability.
In fact, in the provinces, the more children you have, the more it is considered a gift,” said Serve Life spokesperson Anthony Lanicao.
He also said couples with so many unwanted children were “partly at fault” because they should have checked their sexual urges.
For Cabenan, however, Church leaders are partly to blame.
“They tell you to go forth and multiply, but now when you ask for help, they just pass you by,” she said
they only have one room period they eat sleep do everything in one room. i suppose they could go outside like animals.most people live in a house that is the size of a bathroom
just_anotherperson
This guy, justanotherperson, is just among those Filipinos who look at life as a soap opera, like those feel-good teleseryes on TV. They love to show their concern to the poor, but really they're not helping them. They are instead pulling the poor down into the quagmire by encouraging them to procreate beyond their means, to make babies and let some god do the rest. I and my wife have two kids because we use contraceptives, and life is very much OK. Our neighbors got a lot of children, the father is always drunk, there's always fight in the house. It's like some hell over there. But these nuts, like justanotherperson, would tell us to be discipline, use the natural method. Hahaha, natural method isn't it funny? That's only for people like him, for people who are not humans.
While the plight of Cabenan is extreme, it is common in the Philippines to see very large families, particularly among the poor masses. One of Cabenan's neighbors has given birth to 16 children.
The Philippines has one of the highest birth rates in the world -- 3.1 for every woman -- and the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Asia-Pacific, according to the medical charity group Merlin.
The Catholic church, which counts 80 percent of the country's 100 million people as its followers, had for more than a decade successfully lobbied and intimidated politicians into blocking pro-birth control acts in parliament.
Mr Aquino, a Roman Catholic like 80 per cent of the population, has thrown his support behind a reproductive health bill that will, if passed by the two houses of Congress, guarantee access to free birth control and promote sex education.
That's something that
Liza Cabiya-an might have benefited from, if she'd had the opportunity.
Ms Cabiya-an, 39, has 14 children. The oldest is 22, the youngest just 11 months. Their home is a hut in a Manila slum.
Some of the 14 Cabiya-an siblings sleep side by side in a cramped one-bedroom shanty in a Manila slum. The household's monthly income is about Dh660.Reuters
"It's tough when you have so many children," said Cabiya-an, a shy smile revealing poor teeth. "I have to count them before I go to sleep to make sure no one's missing."
At one time Ms Cabiya-an had access to contraception but Manila mayor Jose Atienza, a devout Roman Catholic, swept contraceptives from the shelves of city-run clinics in 2000.
After that, Ms Cabiya-an's efforts to limit the size of her family were patchy, restricted by her meagre resources. She went on and off the birth control pill and resorted to an illegal abortion more than once.
With income of about 7,600 pesos (Dh661) a month from doing laundry and her husband's pay as a labourer, Ms Cabiya-an has only been able to send five of her children to school. The others would appear doomed to join the quarter of the country's 95 million people stuck below the poverty line.
Contraceptives are generally available in the Philippines although they are not used as much as elsewhere.
In the Philippines, 45 to 50 per cent of women of reproductive age, or their partners, are using a contraceptive method at any given time. Indonesia's rate is 56 per cent and Thailand's 80 per cent.
Population growth mirrors that. The Philippines population is increasing by 1.9 per cent a year, while Indonesia's is 1.2 per cent and Thailand's is 0.9 per cent. China's population is growing at an annual rate of 0.6 per cent.
"If you increase access to contraceptives for women ... you will have births averted," said Josefina Natividad, director of the University of the Philippines' Population Institute.
Though available in most places, the cost of contraceptives is prohibitive for many people.
But that should change if the reproductive health bill is passed.
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