PDu30 and Pinays
While not exactly heartwarming—in fact it was rather anticlimactic—the scene of President Duterte meeting Vice President Leni Robredo onstage was weirdly satisfying.
So that was all it took: an invitation to the new Veep to attend an affair also to be graced by the new Chief Executive. One wonders why the folks at Malacañang, especially those surrounding PDu30 (his rather awkward nickname these days), hadn’t thought of it earlier. Unless they shared with the President a visceral dislike of Leni, which speaks volumes about their own lack of maturity and mean-spiritedness than any
possible shortcoming of the Vice President.
But let’s take whatever crumbs of magnanimity fall from the person of our fearless leader.
Whatever this accidental concession signals, even if it leads to cooperation and amity, or not, it has come too late. The snub was given and taken, and it brings into question PDu30’s priorities and personality.
Lest he forget, the President still has to put his “rape joke” behind him, on which the Commission on Human Rights ruled that he had violated the Magna Carta of Women by offending women’s sensibilities—especially those of rape survivors—by making a crass and cruel remark during a campaign sortie. It was a remark, we must note, that was entirely unnecessary, made almost as a side comment, an attempt to elicit laughter.
His treatment of the duly-elected Vice President is not just an offense against Leni Robredo but also against the millions of Filipinos who voted for her. One wonders if this attitude is not indicative of his internalized attitude toward women in general, as he let slip when he made that offensive joke about the gang rape of the Australian missionary.
I suspect his lingering hostility to Leni is rooted in his contempt for women in general, even if he has tried to mask it by his appointment of several women to his Cabinet. So despite the détente signaled by their encounter at the Camp Aguinaldo grandstand, I’m not holding my breath for the emergence of a gender-sensitive President any time soon.
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On July 11, we observe World Population Day, which this year centers on the theme “Investing in Teenage Girls.”
The executive director of the UN Population Fund, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, has used the occasion to call on leaders and communities to “focus on and stand up for the human rights of the most marginalized teenage girls, particularly those who are poor, out of school, exploited, or subjected to harmful traditional practices, including child marriage.”
Here are the numbers behind the context. There are about 830 million boys and girls aged 13 to 19 among the world’s 7.3-billion population. In the Philippines, with a population of 102 million, 33 percent (almost one in three) is aged 0-14 years, while 19 percent (almost one in five) of the population is composed of boys and girls aged 15-24 years.
Given this young population, say experts, the Philippines needs to invest more in schools, while further down the line, “the rapid growth of a young adult population unable to find employment can lead to unrest.”
As I reported in Friday’s column, covering a health technology conference hosted by VisayasHealth, the Philippines faces an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancies, with Filipino adolescents engaging in sex earlier, with more frequency, and using hardly any protection against sexually transmitted infections or pregnancy.
The unplanned and mistimed pregnancies impact not just on the lives of the young mothers (and fathers, too, although only marginally, it seems) but also on those of their children, who face a future haunted by poverty, missed opportunities especially education, and even public shame.
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That’s why the focus of this year’s observance of World Population Day centers on teenage girls. None is more vulnerable and powerless than a girl who is pregnant out of wedlock, who has had to leave school, and because of this faces poor employment or income-generating opportunities.
Efforts must be made to search for girls in this situation and seek ways to ease their reentry into school or the job market, while looking after their health needs (including their postpartum family planning needs) and those of their young children. Indeed, investing in the future of a teenage mother is investing in the future as well of her children and family.
But in the Philippines, the cards are stacked against these girls. In the first place, under an amendment to the Reproductive Health Law imposed by the Supreme Court, a teenager needs to show written approval by a parent before he or she can receive family planning services from a government health center. Secondly, the high court’s temporary restraining order on contraceptive drugs and devices threatens the imminent loss of any access to any form of contraception, even from private providers, and even by adult married couples.
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Given his publicly stated support for family planning, perhaps President Digong can use his influence with the Supreme Court to act with haste on this hanging issue of the TRO against implants and the issuance of new permits to contraceptive marketers.
Almost a year has passed since the TRO was issued, and with estimates of about 11 deaths a day of women from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, of whom a good number are adolescents, we can just imagine the death toll that could have been avoided if contraceptives had just been made available to them.
If he’s looking for ways to make it up to the women of this country, our new leader should take the initiative on this issue. Maybe we can forgive him his “rape joke” then.
