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HEY,
JOE
Philippines:
Children, children everywhere
By Ted
Lerner
MANILA - Every night of the week Nina
cruises the strip of honky-tonk bars on Fields Avenue in
Angeles City carrying a bucket full of peanuts and
candies, which she sells to the foreign and Filipino
customers ogling girls and playing pool. But it's not
the stunning array of snacks that Nina sells that is of
any particular interest. Nina is obviously very
pregnant, a fact that she is obviously proud of.
"This is numbers nine and 10," she says with a
broad smile as she points to her bulging belly. Forget
for a moment that this woman, who could give birth any
day, is traipsing up and down the street selling snacks.
What's more astonishing is that she says she is only 30
years old.
"You see, I'm always having twins.
This is my third twin." Nina says all her children have
been fathered by the same Filipino. He is jobless and
lives with the other children and her mother down south
in the province of Negros. She stays in Angeles and
sells snacks and sends her meager earnings back to the
family.
"He's not my husband," she smiles. "He's
my boyfriend. But he loves me very much. I don't believe
in marriage. I believe in true love." And what about
after this pregnancy? Will she go for numbers 11 and 12?
"I think after this," she says, still smiling,
"I'm going to have the line cut. OK, I gotta go. I got
mouths to feed, yeh?"
Perhaps what's more
amazing than this young woman with so many children is
the fact that in the Philippines, Nina's story is as
common as a bowl of rice, as a swaying coconut tree. How
many other stories like Nina's will walk by her out on
the dark streets? Almost anywhere one travels in the
Philippines, you could select women at random and you'd
likely hear similar stories. Stories of children,
children everywhere, stashed in the provinces where they
can live on mere pesos a day. What happens to all these
children everybody's having in this country? And will
they too each have handfuls of children when then grow
up?
Just as astounding and, yes, frightening as
the reality out on the streets and in the provinces are
the cold hard numbers and statistics. According to the
Family Planning Organization of the Philippines (FPOP),
the longest-running and largest non-governmental
organization (NGO) of its kind in the country, the
Philippines' population stood at 75.3 million in 1998,
making it the 14th most populous nation in the world.
With one of the highest population growth rates in Asia
at 2.3 percent annually, the Philippines' population
will rise to 116.8 million by 2025. Already the
population density of the Philippines is nearly double
the Southeast Asian average and is exceeded only by that
of Singapore.
To put the annual growth rate in
population in another light, consider the economic
growth rate of the Philippines, which over the past few
years has ranged from 2-4 percent, depending on which
figures are used. Even giving leeway on the liberal
side, 4 percent economic growth coupled with a 2.3
percent population growth means the Philippines will
achieve practically nothing in the entire coming century
in trying to rescue and uplift the tens of millions who
scrounge for their daily bread.
In a country
mired in political and economic crisis, where the
politicians constantly battle for turf while more than
50 percent of the people wallow in abject poverty, and
where even the small middle class now finds itself
slipping toward the precipice, one might assume that the
population explosion in the Philippines would be of
vital importance and given dire urgency by the
government. The reality, however, couldn't be more
different. In fact with the current dispensation in
place, it could well be argued that many gains made by
NGOs such as FPOP over the past decade have actually
been reversed.
FPOP was established in 1969 with
the goal of providing family-planning services. Its
stated goals are to ensure universal access to quality
family-planning information; education and services; to
increase adolescent involvement in addressing their
sexual and reproductive concerns; and to mobilize public
support to safeguard the individual right to family
planning. The organization currently operates 26
chapters and 35 clinics throughout the Philippines and
handles nearly 200,000 women annually.
"We offer
choices so they can choose what's best for them," FPOP's
executive director, Dora Raterta, told Asia Times
Online. However, in a country where the powerful Roman
Catholic Church plays a major role in not only daily
life but also political life, the full range of choices
is not readily available to a good portion of the
population.
"The government has a duty to
provide education and services," Raterta said. "Yet
there is no national legislated policy to ensure the
right to contraception." Instead the government takes
its lead from the church, which is 100 percent against
any and all artificial contraception, including condoms.
"The current government wants to mainstream natural
family-planning methods. This would curtail our
efforts."
In the early and mid-1990s, under the
presidency of Fidel Ramos, the government took an active
role in trying to educate men and women about the full
range of choices available to them, including artificial
contraception. Although the church vigorously
disapproved, Raterta says the level of informed choice
then was much better. Still, she said, promoting
contraception in the Philippines is an issue many local
and national leaders would just as soon shy away from.
"There's a lack of political will," she said.
"Not all government units are resolute. They don't have
it as a priority." Incredibly, the current mayor of
Manila has decreed that artificial contraception is not
to be made available in his city, save for condoms at
the drugstore.
The Reproductive Health Care Act,
which would put the government squarely behind promoting
the full range of choice in family-planning education,
including artificial methods, is currently pending in
the House of Representatives. Groups such as FPOP are
vigorously supporting bill. As could be expected,
however, the bill is also receiving stiff resistance.
According to Raterta, those against the bill, including
and especially the Catholic Church, find three
contentious issues in the initiative. For one, the
opponents claim that all artificial methods of
contraception, including the use of condoms, are
equivalent to causing an abortion, as even the sperm and
egg are considered alive. Second, only parents should
teach sexuality, not the state, nor the schools. And
third, sex is for procreation only.
Raterta said
the bill has a 50-50 chance of passing. But even if it
does pass, the problem then is whether the president
will sign it. All indications are that she will not sign
the bill. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is known to
be very religious and also close to the Catholic
hierarchy in the Philippines.
"The president
will go for whatever the church says," Raterta said. "It
is her conviction."
"She's been very vague on
the issue," said Mary Ann Godez, FPOP's executive
officer. "She recognizes that everyone has a right to
know and have an informed choice. But then government
says that population is never a problem." Indeed the
church and its supporters go as far as claiming that the
more people there are, the better. In an interview with
the Asia Times Online, Monsignor Hernando Carbonel,
spokesman for the Catholic Bishops Conference of the
Philippines, the umbrella group that oversees the
powerful Catholic hierarchy, actually debunked the
entire myth of a population explosion.
"It's not
the population that is the problem," he said. "It's the
great disparity of wealth. If the wealthy would share
what they have, then the population would not be a
problem." FPOP's Raterta insists, however, that money is
hardly the issue.
"It's not just about money,"
she said. "We face women every day. There are a lot of
other issues. High-risk pregnancies such as having
children too close together. Lack of education. Too many
pregnancies. The quality of life at the micro level."
Raterta claims also that opponents of responsible family
planning often twist the issue by saying that
family-planning organizations such as FPOP want to
dictate how many children people can have.
"We
don't want to tell people how many children they can
have," she said. "We want to educate people as to their
rights and choices."
On top of being up against
powerful interests, family-planning advocates in the
Philippines also must deal with particular social mores.
Many Filipino men, for instance, especially those of the
lower classes in the provinces, refuse to wear condoms.
It's called the macho system, where sex must be "skin to
skin" or it isn't any good.
It is this kind of
social gauntlet that has led to some fascinating
techniques being employed by NGOs to spread their
message. At one recent professional boxing match, a
non-profit group called DKT signed on as the major
sponsor. DKT is a subsidized NGO that distributes and
sells Trust condoms at a nominal cost to help curb the
spread of sexually transmitted diseases and to help curb
runaway population growth.
DKT's marketing
strategy included the appearance of the Trust mascot,
known as Super "T". This giant blue phallic-symbol
superhero stood well over 180 centimeters tall and wore
dark-blue boots, blue trunks, blue gloves, blue goggles
and a blue cape. He had a wide smile permanently
splashed across his face and the capital letters "ST"
embossed on his muscular chest. His bald blue head was
also pointed at the top.
Super "T" was the hit
of the night as he paraded around the ballroom, always
ready with a hearty handshake. On top of this, Trust
condom banners were hanging all over the ballroom and
could clearly be seen on TV. As could the corner pads in
the ring, which were emblazoned with the Trust logo. A
giant blow-up balloon version of Super "T" stood in the
back of the room and children ran around and punched and
jumped on it the whole night. Between fights Super "T"
himself jumped into the ring and tossed hundreds of
prizes and giveaways into the crowd. Yes, Super "T" was
tossing condoms into the audience.
This being
the conservative Philippines, however, meant that Super
"T" couldn't exactly just toss a foil condom package
into the crowd. Instead he threw hundreds of key chains
into the audience and inside each key chain was a
condom. There were also lots of blue Trust T-shirts
given away as well. Not only did the T-shirts come with
Super "T's" picture splashed across the front, but they
also came with a brand-new condom sewn into the left
sleeve. And don't for a minute think the crowd was
ashamed or upset. Filipinos love anything for free and
the crowd eagerly fought for and grabbed every single
free condom.
While products such as beer and
hardware are usually the typical sponsors of fight
cards, one of the marketing managers of DKT on hand
pointed out why they considered boxing to be the perfect
venue to promote their cause. Boxing, she said, is
watched mostly by men. And Filipino men, she noted, have
this macho image they often want to uphold and, thus,
many don't want to wear condoms. The men who watch
boxing come from all levels of Filipino society, but the
sport is most popular amongst the masses, especially the
middle and lower classes. These are the people DKT wants
to reach, as they are likely to be ignorant of sexually
transmitted diseases. They are also the ones having way
too many babies, which many cannot afford to raise.
While it may be hard to imagine a boxing event
as being on the forefront of the gargantuan task to
educate and promote responsible family planning and the
fight to stop the spread of sexually transmitted
diseases, obviously, using a blue superhero phallic
symbol with free condoms to give away is quite a clever
idea. Clearly, though, that and other private measures
will have little lasting effect unless the government
puts its muscle into fully educating a populace that
seems to expand exponentially. In the Philippines,
though, the leadership prefers to pretend that the
problem doesn't even exist. Which means that the NGOs
could be all that's out there for quite some time.
Ted Lerner is the author of the
book Hey, Joe - A Slice of the City, an American in
Manila, as well as an upcoming book of Asian travel
stories, The Traveler and the Gate Checkers. He
can be reached at tedlheyjoe@yahoo.com.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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