Arroyo legacy may include more mothers put at risk

By JAILEEN F. JIMENO - PCIJ

UBAY, BOHOL — Antonia Quirino sits with a dazed look on top of the stairs of her bamboo house amid a large swath of cornfield. She speaks laconically, as if every word is a labor. Filth surrounds her; debris of past meals remain on the dirty kitchen and table, the clotheslines display tiny clothes too grimy and stained to be considered ready for wear. Nearby, a few of her children sleep the day away.

At 40, Quirino is a mother of 10 children, and is four months away from giving birth to her 11th. She delivers at home and has known no prenatal or postnatal care, yet her nipa hut is just a few meters off the main road that leads to Bohol’s tourist-drawing resorts. She is a mother at risk, but she is below the radar of the government, which has sworn off providing free contraceptives, and which does not encourage information about their use.

About a 90-minute plane ride away, in Malacañang, sits a woman whose family planning policy, many say, has directly or indirectly consigned Quirino to her fate.

When she first took power in 2001, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo initially issued confusing statements on her family planning policy. She once admitted using pills in her early years as a mother and wife, but said that as a Roman Catholic, it made her go to confession. In 2002, in an apparent effort to woo the Church, which supported her predecessor’s ouster, she ruled out the purchase of contraceptive materials and tossed the responsibility of buying these supplies to local governments. She has since fortified that policy to placate the Church as her government battled numerous threats to its survival. It has also resulted to the undue delegation of official power and handing over of state funds to a private group allied with the Church.

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Dr. Junice Melgar, head of the NGO Linangan ng Kababaihan or Likhaan, also says that women’s health is now being sacrificed for political expediency. “This is her legacy," she says, referring to President Arroyo. “Women will remember her harshly for this. This is a woman who has been very unkind. She is pushing women into unsafe pregnancies, and probably even death."

In a paper that reported the effects of the contraceptive ban in the city of Manila, Likhaan noted that Arroyo “is the first president since 1969 to weld its policies not to medical standards, but to the moral standards of the (Roman) Catholic Church." (See sidebar) Melgar also asserts, “The major battle is the president herself. It’s not just the Church, but the president’s own attitude toward women."

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