Duterte’s latest skirmish with church
WHEN Lizel Torreras, 35, became pregnant with her third child, she mixed a tincture of herbs and mahogany bark, a home remedy said to induce abortion. Her husband, who worked as a garbage scavenger, did not make enough money to buy a regular supply of birth control pills, much less raise another child.
“With just two kids, we were already struggling,” she said. “The children were going to have a hard time. We might not have been able to send them to school.”
But after three attempts, Torreras, a churchgoing Catholic, could not bring herself to drink the potion.
Like millions of other women in the Philippines who have no access to contraception, Torreras had the baby.
This month, the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, signed an executive order calling for the full and immediate enforcement of a 2012 law that would give 6 million women like Torreras free contraception and reproductive health services.
Duterte portrayed the order as an anti-poverty measure, with an official calling it “pro-life, pro-women, prochildren and pro-economic development”. But the order was also Duterte’s latest jab at the Roman Catholic Church, which wields significant power in the Philippines and has fought to keep the law from taking effect.
Under the law, government agencies will provide modern family planning services, including free contraceptives and prenatal care to all women and families. The measure also mandates that sex education be taught in schools and that companies offer reproductive health services to their employees.
But the law, which took more than 13 years to be passed by Congress before being signed into law in 2012, has yet to fully take effect, a testament to the power of the Catholic Church.
The church and other contraception opponents filed petitions with the Supreme Court, which issued several rulings blocking parts of the law. The court continues to prevent the Health Department from procuring, distributing or selling birth control implants, a ban women’s health groups fear could be extended to hormonal birth control.
Last year, Congress cut the Health Department’s budget for contraceptives, citing the court order halting the distribution of implants. This month, Vicente Sotto III, the Senate majority leader, vowed to stop the distribution of condoms in high schools, arguing that they encouraged promiscuity.
The battle is not over, but Duterte’s order provides clear guidance to government agencies and health officials that they should uphold the law, eliminating some of the ambiguity the various court decisions have caused. And while the church still opposes the law in principle, it has scaled back its public campaign against it.
The Duterte administration says it can provide desperately needed services that are vital to lifting millions of people out of poverty. It estimates that there are 6 million women, 2 million of whom are poor, who do not have access to modern forms of contraception.
Duterte’s order aims to achieve “zero unmet need for family planning” by 2018, helping to meet his goal of reducing the poverty rate to 14 percent by the end of his administration in 2022, down from the 2015 level of 21.6 percent.
Sex education, advocates say, has been a failure. The Philippines is the only country in Asia where teenage pregnancy increased over the past two decades.
“A lot of the existing education in the Philippines is abstinence only, and this contributes to teenage pregnancy,” said Hope Basiao-Abella, project coordinator for Likhaan, a nongovernmental organisation dedicated to women’s health.
Duterte’s executive order is not his first clash with the church in his seven months in office.
He has called the church “the most hypocritical institution”, accusing priests and bishops of graft, corruption and taking mistresses. He called Pope Francis a son of a whore [and later apologised], openly accused the church of pedophilia and claimed to have been sexually abused by a priest as a teenager. And he has accused the church of doing nothing to combat drugs, which he sees as the country’s biggest problem.
For its part, the church has opposed his push to reinstate the death penalty and has begun to publicly criticise his anti-drug campaign, which has left more than 3,600 people dead.
“We will continue to oppose those because they are inhuman,” said Arch- bishop Ramón Arguelles of Lipa.
He added, of Duterte, “I think whether he knows it or not, whenever we do anything bad, you are the tool of the devil. If you bring harm to others, you are the devil’s tool.”
Priests across the Philippines have urged citizens to speak out against the killings in the drug campaign. In the days before Christmas, the Redemptorist Church of Baclaran in Manila mounted a photo exhibition of its victims, blood-soaked corpses strewn in the streets and grieving families, aimed to prick a sense of outrage among churchgoers.
Fighting the church is not without risk. More than 80 percent of Filipinos identify as Catholic, and the church was instrumental in toppling two presidents, Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and Joseph Estrada in 2001.
But Duterte appears to be winning this fight. Rather than repelling Catholics with his sacrilegious outbursts, his willingness to confront the church has endeared him to Filipinos.
According to a pair of 2016 polls by Pulse Asia, 86 percent of Filipinos support government-supported reproductive health services, and 55 percent want the administration to prioritise programs to combat poverty.
While the church may have lost this battle, Arguelles says Duterte has not won the war.
“He said he was going to destroy the church,” he said.
“The only thing I can tell him is that Hitler tried to do that, Bismarck tried to do that, Napoleon tried to do that. The church is still there, all these people are gone.”