15 Mar Abortion, Female Empowerment, and Equality
The premise of female empowerment is to grant women the same freedoms and privileges that men enjoy. There was a time when women were relegated to the home, while their husbands had the freedom to pursue chosen careers. There was a time when women were not provided education, while men were trained in a varied spectrum of industries. With the help of decades of movements that fought for equality, the gap between the privileges of men and women has been reduced.
However, due to certain social and traditional perspectives, a woman still does not enjoy the liberty that men do. One reason for this is a woman’s association with the duty and burden of child rearing. At a time when the demand for individual productivity and efficiency has risen, society still holds the view that a woman’s primary responsibility is reproduction.
This paradigm is more insidious in conservative countries like the Philippines, where religious thought still dominates the political dialogue and influence the creation of public policies.
In the article “Stalled RH law may lead to more unintended pregnancies, maternal deaths,” Jhesset O. Enano reports on the lack of proper reproductive health measures available in the country, exacerbated by a 2015 Supreme Court order prohibiting the recertification of reproductive supplies.
In the same article, PopCom executive director Juan Antonio Perez III was quoted to have said, “Around 70 percent of married women want family planning, but they cannot access these services. We don’t even have to convince them anymore.”
The stigma, the lack of reproductive health options, and the lack of sexual education in the Philippines all contribute to further constrain women by making them vulnerable to unintended pregnancies.
The policy brief, “Access to Safe and Legal Abortion and Post-Abortion Care Can Save Filipino Women’s Lives” offers some staggering statistics:
- Nearly three in ten births are either unwanted or mistimed.
- One in ten adolescent women aged 15-19 years old are pregnant with their first child or are already mothers
- The number of young mothers aged 15-19 has more than doubled in the last decade
Female empowerment can’t be achieved as long as a woman is vulnerable to the burden of an unwanted pregnancy. An effective and reliable means for fertility management should be considered a human right.
Currently, the burden and consequence of an unintended pregnancy is carried exclusively by women. An unintended pregnancy can end a woman’s career, interrupt a female student’s studies, lead a woman to financial ruin, and shove her into early parenthood. Apart from the fact that it is a woman who has to undergo the pregnancy, there are no government systems in the Philippines that could reliably compel fathers to provide assistance to a mother and child. In other words, Filipino men exclusively enjoy a privilege that women don’t: the ability to refuse parenthood.
In the Philippines, there remains a heavy stigma linked to procedures that seek to end a pregnancy. Service providers and healthcare professionals who can end a pregnancy are considered criminals by the government.
It is this stigma that continues to enable the subjugation of women, that restricts reproductive health options, and puts their lives in danger on a daily basis. It is this stigma too that helps reinforce gender-based discrimination that associates and restricts a woman’s social role to child rearing.
The policy brief mentioned earlier reveals that:
- 3 women die every day from unsafe abortion complications
- 11 women are hospitalized every hour
- 70 women induce abortion every hour
With or without proper access to procedures that could end a pregnancy, women understand the physical and financial demands of a pregnancy. Since there remains a legal restriction in the Philippines for procedures to end pregnancies, some women have been pushed to resort to unsafe abortions.
The legal restrictions on abortion violate a woman’s right to autonomy and body integrity.
A woman should have the freedom to choose what happens to her body and should not be coerced to bear the burden of a pregnancy that she neither wanted nor intended.
Women should have the freedom and choice to end a pregnancy that could compromise their careers, their finances, and especially their health. An unintended pregnancy should not be able to end of a woman’s dreams, aspirations, and goals.
In order to uphold female empowerment and equality, we must allow access to safe and legal abortions. It is time that we recognize abortion as a human right.
For more resources on abortion please view EnGendeRights’ Policy Briefs and Fact Sheets.
Sources:
Enano, J. (2017, January). “Stalled RH law may lead to more unintended pregnancies, maternal deaths.” Retrieved on: February 24, 2017.
Padilla, C. R. (2016, December). “Access to Safe and Legal Abortion and Post-Abortion Care Can Save Filipino Women’s Lives.” Retrieved on: March 13, 2017.