Last Saturday, the tabloid Bulgar carried this most sordid headline: “4 Anak Nilunod ni Mommy” (4 Children Drowned by Mommy).
I’ll give a brief summary of what happened, omitting the names of the people involved. A 35-year-old woman told her husband she was taking her four children, aged 12, 6, 5 and 6 months, to the river. Two hours later, she returned alone and told her husband she had drowned all the children. The husband rushed to the river but was too late to save the children.
The woman said she had drowned the children because of poverty. Reading about the incident, I realized poverty is so much more graphic when it’s described in Tagalog: “wala na siyang maipakain”—she could not feed them anymore.
I’m going to return to this incident toward the end of my column, but I want to be very clear here that I’m not zeroing in on Calatrava. It could have been any other town in the Philippines, or some other country. My column title, “Cairo to Calatrava,” gives a broader context in which such tragedies happen.
ICPD
There was painful irony to that incident, because as that mother agonized about her children, a conference was being held in Berlin to mark the 15th anniversary of the ICPD or International Conference on Population and Development.
The acronym is unfamiliar to many people, but for those who do recognize it, the reactions can be quite different, being either very positive or very negative. It was at the ICPD that governments agreed to work on problems around “reproductive health,” now often abbreviated to RH, as in the “RH bill” now being hotly debated in Congress.
Back in 1994, at the ICPD, there were also furious debates around the proposed Program of Action. Supporters of the Program of Action said they were trying to move the world forward from an old “population control” paradigm which looked at “population explosion” as the main cause of poverty. Advocates of this “control” position saw the solution to poverty in birth control, convincing (or forcing) people, mainly the poor, to keep their families small.
In Cairo, women’s rights organizations joined public health associations, health professionals’ associations and other NGOs to pressure the government representatives to support a new perspective on population. This was a “rights-based” approach that looked at family planning as only one of many rights that women and men were entitled to. The emphasis was on allowing people to make informed decisions about their reproductive life and their reproductive health.
ICPD also related population issues to development issues, from environmental conservation to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
With this rights-and-development perspective, the RH agenda was expanded to include many other services besides family planning. These included prenatal and postnatal care, protection from sexually-transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS. Also on the expanded agenda were such issues as child marriage, trafficking of women and girls, and domestic violence (now often referred to as intimate partner violence to include unmarried couples, as we’ve been seeing in the last few days’ headlines).
Finally, because the emphasis was on informed choices, RH advocates also pushed for access to information and education on gender and sexuality. This included access for young people.
DEATHS
RH did not sit well with conservatives, mainly from Islam and the Roman Catholic Church. RH, they said, was shorthand for abortion. Condoms and sex education would lead to more promiscuity, pregnancies and AIDS. References to “gender rights” were interpreted as homosexual rights.
Today, in the Philippines, RH is attacked as part of a “DEATHS agenda”: divorce, euthanasia, abortion, total population control, homosexuality and sex education.
Because the anti-RH rhetoric is so sweeping, many people become “convinced” about the evil of RH because they can pick and choose. One congressman interviewed on TV said he was totally in favor of family planning, but did not like sex education, so he was opposing the RH bill. Others, fearful of homosexuality, say that sex education leads to gender rights and eventually same-sex marriages.
As the debates rage, many people will be caught in the crossfire, mainly those who desperately need RH services, as we saw in the Negros Occidental tragedy.
Curiously, even as the authorities prepare charges of parricide against the woman, they’ve also speculated that she was suffering from “postpartum syndrome.” The tabloid article said, in Filipino, that the syndrome was “normal in up to 80 percent of women who have delivered” and that this was “temporary.”
I would warn against medicalizing the depression mothers might encounter after delivery. No one really knows the incidence of this depression, which may indeed be very transient but which could extend into a more extreme “postpartum psychosis,” which the Canadian Mental Health Association estimates to occur in about 1 out of every 1,000 births.
There are individual predisposing factors to postpartum depression but the lack of social support figures very prominently here. This social support variable may account for cross-cultural differences in the incidence of the depression. In the Philippines, the traditional extended family system means everyone coming in to volunteer help. If ever, the problems come from having too many visitors and kibitzers.
That extended system is breaking down in urban areas. I suspect poverty, too, can be so overwhelming that even with relatives around, depression can set in.
RH is about helping people to make their choices so children are welcomed and loved, rather than seen as a burden. RH is about setting up the support systems, beyond kinship, for parents, especially in times of crisis.
Tabloid newspapers fill their first page with lurid headlines, and then give the details on page 2, the inside front page. The Calatrava incident appeared with other depressing news, including a young man’s suicide, fake bicycle brakes confiscated from two manufacturers, a man in Pangasinan killing two children (ages 3 and 5) and his mother, aged 80. Next to the Calatrava article was an article about Deputy National Security Adviser Luis “Chavit” Singson, being reprimanded by Malacańang for his statements to the press over allegations of violence against his former live-in partner. If you look hard, you’ll find there’s RH too in many of the other stories.
Email mtan@inquirer.com.ph
