Since her parents were poor, Hazel Baraw was sent to her aunt to work as soon as she entered high school. Shortly after that, she was working for other people who had promised to send her to school. But the house chores assigned to her were so tedious and long (up to 10 oclock at night) she could hardly take a rest. If Hazel Baraw had the chance to study (she went as far as second year high school), all the odds were against her to go very far.
While sending her mistresss son to school, she met a guy working as a carpenter in the newly developed subdivision. A year later, she ended up living in the carpenters bunkhouse. Years later, she had four children to feed.
“Our culture always suggests that women are helpless and worthless without a man,” said Canson. “In a Third World country like the Philippines, women are treated as a commodity: as a body to sell products in advertisements and commercials, as a source of cheap labor for factories abroad and as consumer of goods like contraceptives.
But Canson said the issue at stake in this controversy is not so much the family planning method per se but whether women were given a choice on what to do with their own bodies.
“The tubal ligation endorsed by the city government is controversial only when its promoted as an incentive,” she said, referring to an international agreement on reproductive heath, which says that “women should not be intimidated, coerced, forced or bribed into adopting a particular planning method.” She said coercion violates choice, as a womans right over her own body.
After Mayor Rodrigo Duterte announced on his TV program that he was giving out cash to women and men who would agree to undergo tubal ligation and vasectomy, city department heads were quick to correct that the 5,000 pesos (later reduced to 3,000 pesos) cash given out by the city were financial subsidies, not incentives, to the poorest of the poor.
But the Church believes otherwise. Artificial family planning method is an outright violation of life, said the Family Planning Crusade in a strongly worded statement.
Canson said the Church has so much to account for the prevailing patriarchal culture that perpetuates the subordination of women. In the mass media, a woman is regarded as a commodity for sale, someone who is weak and has to be saved by a man. Hence, the younger Hazel Baraw, unable to finish high school and desperate to start a new life, had turned to someone she thought would take her out from the life of servitude, but ended up not any better.
Canson said women who are poor ended up far worse. Some of them are forced into sex trafficking or prostitution.
Women are often left out in the argument between the Church and the State, where systemic structures have often rendered them weak and helpless. “Most often, in our culture, its the men who set the norm on how women and men should behave,” said Canson, “and many of these standards set by men are double standards and oppressive to women.”
In a series of seminars before her wedding, Hazel Baraw recalled being told by the priest never to take any contraceptives because it is a sin against God.
But life in the bunkhouse had been very hard that sometimes the family had to eat bananas or cassava for lunch. Sometimes, the children had to skip school.
Hazel Baraw knew that she had to stake a claim on her own body in order to survive. (Germelina Lacorte/davaotoday.com)
Gender Issues, Religion
