By Carmel Crimmins
MANILA — Nick couldn’t believe so many of his friends had become accidental fathers when he returned to the Philippines after five years overseas.
“There are still a lot of people who just don’t buy condoms,” said the 29-year-old business student.
“It’s partly a religious thing — the act of buying them means that you intend to have sex. But there are a lot of guys who really don’t care if they get you pregnant.”
A macho culture and myths about side-effects from condoms, used by only an estimated 1.9 percent of married couples, and vasectomies mean that contraception in the developing Southeast Asian country is seen as the woman’s problem.
And a problem it is.
Now home to around 85 million people, the Philippines has one of the fastest-growing populations in Asia with around 2 million babies born every year, many of them in overstretched public hospitals where new mothers have to share beds.
The number of Filipinos is expected to swell to 142 million by 2040, by the government’s own estimates, and the rapid arrival of new mouths to feed is straining the country’s creaking infrastructure and choking efforts to cut poverty.
While family size has fallen to 3.5 children per woman from six in the 1970s, Filipino mothers, on average, still have one more child than they want to, according to research by the Alan Guttmacher Institute.
To deal with the financial and emotional strain, around half a million women are estimated to have abortions every year despite the procedure being illegal and strictly taboo in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country.
Nearly 80,000 are hospitalized with complications.
PLAYING SAFE
The Catholic faith, which opposes artificial birth control, is often blamed for the population boom. But a government survey showed that among the 51 percent of married women who do not use family planning, only 2.4 percent said it was due to religion.
The main reason for women avoiding birth control, aside from wanting a child, was fear of side-effects, sometimes reflecting the negative attitude of their husbands to condoms, intra-uterine devices and pills.
But a lack of education about contraceptives and poor access are also major issues and some experts say the government, under pressure from the dominant Catholic church, is to blame.
“I know so many Catholics practicing modern contraceptive methods and it doesn’t bother their conscience,” said Eden Divinagracia, executive director of the Philippine NGO council on population, health and wealth.
“But the administration right now is not supportive of family planning. The president is playing safe.”
Successive governments have shied away from widely supplying contraceptives or teaching birth control in schools for fear of triggering the wrath of the country’s bishops, who can make or break an administration.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who survived an impeachment attempt last year, is particularly reliant on the support of the church and shows no sign of reversing her emphasis on natural family planning over artificial methods.
In the meantime, job creation cannot keep up with the growth in the labor force and education standards are dropping due to overcrowded schools.
Elizabeth Pangalanan, executive director of the Center for Integrative and Development Studies, said the state was conceding to one religion in matters of reproductive health.
“The state should enforce these rights,” she said at a recent forum. “The Catholic church has often exaggerated certain issues and takes them out of context. What it needs is honesty and truth-telling, which they often preach, regarding sex education.”
PRIVATE INITIATIVES
With the central administration turning the other cheek and only a handful of local governments devoting funding to condoms and pills, poor Filipinos — who make up the bulk of the population — must rely on foreign donors for contraceptives.
The U.S. government agency USAID has been the biggest provider of birth control devices in the Philippines for the past 30 years but has stopped supplying condoms and plans to end the rest of its contraceptive donation program by 2008.
USAID, which declined a Reuters request to comment, has said its phase-out was in line with Manila’s goal of self-reliance in family planning and pointed to the private sector as an alternative supplier of contraceptives.
But Dr. Zahidul Huque of the United Nations Population Fund said private businesses were not ready to take up where USAID was leaving off for fear of a negative reaction from the church.
“USAID are pulling out without preparing the country,” Huque said.
In the absence of a government push to tackle population growth, charities and local medical professionals are trying to fill the gap.
Dr. Jonathan Flavier, one of the few Filipino men to have had a vasectomy, is encouraging others to have the procedure. For him, the problem is not machismo but fear about an operation that lasts, at most, 30 minutes.
“We are more scaredy cats than macho,” Flavier said.
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