ATENEO DROPS POPULATION MANAGEMENT COURSE
But advocates of natural family planning have become stronger in recent years, having clinched seats in various levels in government since Gloria Macapagal Arroyo became president. Recently, their influence has been felt even in schools like the Ateneo de Manila University, which is run by the Jesuits, who are considered to be mavericks among the Catholic orders.

	NURSE May Catherine Sumapal (right) counsels La Frutera's workers on family planning. [photo by Jaileen Jimeno]

This year, the Ateneo would have offered an MBA in Health, with emphasis on strategic population research management. But pro-life and several similarly aligned groups protested, saying that “as a Catholic university, the Ateneo should not be receiving funding support from an organization that openly espouses abortion, population control, and reproductive health.” Ateneo has dropped the course.

Dr. Napoleon Juanillo, program director of Ateneo’s Leadership and Managerial Excellence in Health Systems, says that being a “transplant” from Cornell University, he was surprised at the level of discourse on the issue of population in the country. “It’s pushing us back to the medieval period,” he says. “It is an affront to science, on the rights of women.”

He says the course, which was to receive a $250,000 funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, would have elevated the discourse on population management to a “more intelligent, scientific level.” Yet while he expresses disappointment over the scrapping of the course, Juanillo says he takes his hat off to the Catholic Church and pro-life groups like the Alliance for the Family Foundation Inc. (ALFI) for having “a good war tactic.”

ALFI wrote letters to Ateneo officials and demanded that the course be pulled out. Says Juanillo: “They merely did what they had to do, since it is part of their advocacy.”

He admits that the university was unprepared for the negative reaction to the course. In the end, he says, the university was left all alone carrying the flag. He says NGOs should have backed the school, adding, “This is a wake-up call to the RH (reproductive health) groups. They should fight and join the sphere. The NGOs did not do their job.”

That may be because they were busy trying to convince local and national officials to fund family planning measures other than the natural methods. As some NGO workers tell it, they would rather not have a repeat of what happened to Manila under Mayor Joselito ‘Lito’ Atienza, who ended a nine-year run in City Hall just recently and is now the environment secretary.

Atienza banned contraceptives in Manila from 2000 to May 2007. Women interviewed earlier this year by Likhaan, the Reproductive Health, Rights and Ethics Center for Studies and Training (ReproCen), and Center for Reproductive Rights told tales of financial, physical, and emotional difficulties when contraceptives totally disappeared from Manila’s health centers.

Some of the 67 women interviewed for the NGOs’ study said they wanted to have two to three children, but ended up with more than double their ideal number of offspring when contraceptives and ligation at government-funded facilities were banned. All of them belonged to the poorest bracket of society, where a P35 packet of pills is an unbearable monthly burden.

WOMEN, DOCTORS TELL TALES OF WOE
One 32-year-old mother of seven said she had wanted just three children. She wanted to be ligated after her fifth pregnancy. But the public hospital she went to would not perform the procedure, citing Atienza’s Executive Order 003, which was already in effect. In language, that EO pushed for natural family planning, but in practice, it worked against any artificial method.

Then there was a 36-year-old mother of eight who had dreamed of having only two children. She said that she was unable to get her regular supply of pills. She wanted to undergo tubal ligation after her fourth child, but the public hospital near her home no longer offered the service. By then, she said, her family’s daily meals were already consisting of just three sachets of coffee and a few pieces of pandesal for breakfast, rice and soy sauce for lunch, and bread for dinner.

Officials of the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital also observed many high-risk cases among women patients, because of “anemia, too-frequent deliveries, very short spacing, and sometimes no spacing at all,” said the NGOs’ study.

An official at another government hospital told the NGO interviewers that the ban resulted in many unwanted pregnancies, prompting a greater “tendency to have an abortion.” One hospital director, in fact, said that abortion complications, including deaths, were “the second largest cause of admissions in his hospital, and a leading cause (of admission) in most hospitals.”

Other women interviewed post-Atienza told of marital spats, physical and verbal abuse, and being abandoned by their partner because of their refusal to have sex to avoid getting pregnant.

Government health workers agree with those from NGOs that Atienza’s EO 003 should be revoked. But they say that with the national government policy on family planning similar to Atienza’s, a legal victory is unlikely.