Voting with our gonads

By Rina Jimenez-David - At Large - Philippine Daily Inquirer

WASHINGTON, D.C.—“Voting with our gonads” is how Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral subtitled her presentation at a workshop at the recent “Women Deliver” conference here.

Tracking “the quest for a national reproductive health policy,” Cabral opened her talk by tracing the origins of the words “testify,” “testimony” and even “testament” to “testes,” claiming that men once swore by the veracity of their statements with their manhood. And in over a decade struggling with the issue of reproductive health and rights and setting state policy covering it, it seems that legislators and policy-makers have relied more on “gut feel,” public opinion and personal perception rather than on scientific evidence and on public good.

Speaking before Secretary Cabral was Dr. Junice Melgar of the NGO Likhaan, who discussed the “Chilling Effect of Contraceptive and Abortion Bans” in the country. Reproductive health policy enjoyed what Melgar called the “golden age” of reproductive health policy in the 1990s when the DOH, soon after the 1994 Cairo Conference on population and development, crafted a 10-element program to promote the health of women and girls. (Read full article here.)