Sunday, February 26, 2012

When a country cracks down on contraception: grim lessons from the Philippines...

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Those who cast contraception as a private, personal matter ought to consider the case of the Philippines.

Over the past few decades, as most of the world has embraced family planning, the majority-Catholic nation has waged war on reproductive rights. There, abortion is strictly prohibited and crackdowns on contraception are common. Church officials promote what they call “natural” family planning: women are advised to track their cycle and abstain from sex on all but their least fertile days. They cast “artificial” contraception as an affront to God’s will, a gateway to abortion and a threat to public health. In their minds, condoms are “abortifacients” and family-planning campaigners are, as Archbishop Paciano Aniceto told me in 2008, “propagandists of a culture death.”

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And it’s not just Manila. The church’s decades-old campaign against modern contraception has led to an epidemic of unsafe abortions in the Philippines. The country’s high unmet need for contraception means that almost half of pregnancies are unwanted and about 500,000 per year result in abortion. All too often, these procedures are unsafe. Every year, an estimated 60,000 Filipinas are injured trying to terminate a pregnancy. About 1,000 die from abortion-related complications. Full story...

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