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What the Health Centers are NOT Telling the Public

By Haggai De Cena of Filipinos for Life

Last Holy Week, I visited a remote barangay in Davao del Norte. There, I managed to have a small talk with some friends and about their life and their condition. One of the issue that was brought up is their family life and their livelihood. One of the women said that she is using birth control pills so as to prevent herself from getting pregnant. She has a child, about two years of age, and she don’t want to add another child because she believes that the salary of her husband will never be enough to cover the expenses for a growing child. She told me that she acquire birth pills from their local health center.

Family planning are one of the programs that are usually available in local health centers around the Philippines. Local health centers have an array of birth control pills, condoms, IUDs and other contraceptive tools that are distributed freely to mothers like my friend who don’t want to have another child.

During the course of our talks, I discovered that their health centers are just distributing those birth control pills without telling her and other women in the barangay of the negative health effects of those birth control pills. My friend does not know that the birth control pills that she is taking increases her risk to have a breast cancer. Also, she also doesn’t know that the birth control pills that she is taking is actually killing a newly formed life inside her womb.

The withholding of negative health effects and abortifacient effects of birth control pills is an injustice to Filipino women. The Department of Health must be held liable for putting Filipino women at risk of breast cancer and a host of temporary and permanent side effects of birth control pills.

Local health centers are zealous in distributing contraceptive tools in their area but they fail to properly inform women of the effects of those tools to their health. It is frightening to think that this “failure” by local health centers will continue once the RH Bill become a law. How many women will have breast cancer? How many of these women will unknowingly abort their babies?

Before the RH Bill is passed, I suggest that the personnel of health centers be required to educated the people about the negative health effects of birth control pills, IUDs and other contraceptive tools.