MANILA, Philippines At the height of the debates surrounding the Responsible

Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law (RH law), many pro-life groups vowed that
passing the law could signal the countrys transition to legalized abortion.
The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), for instance, warned the
public that a contraceptive mentality preceded abortion mentality.
Statistics on induced abortion in the Philippines, however, paint a different reality.
Although induced or elective abortion has never been legal in the country,
thousands of women every year choose to terminate their pregnancy, with most of
these procedures being performed unsafely.
Recent estimates
Researchers from the Guttmacher Institute and the University of the Philippines
Population Institute estimated that over 470,000 induced abortions were performed
in the Philippines in 2000.
This translates to almost a third of women aged 15 to 44 choosing to have an
abortion after getting pregnant.
This estimate was based mainly on patient records indicating post-abortion care
from over 1,000 hospitals nationwide. But because not all women need or
successfully obtain treatment after an abortion, hospitalization numbers alone do
not capture the magnitude of induced abortions in the country.
In 2010, the number of hospitalizations due to abortion complications was projected
at 90,000. This raised the estimated incidence of induced abortions to 560,000 in
that year alone.
Who are having abortions?
Although women of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds have induced
abortions, more poor women (68%) choose to have this procedure compared to nonpoor women (32%). And because safe surgical abortions can cost as much as
P15,000, poor women are also more likely to have unsafe abortions compared to
their richer counterparts.
Researchers have also shown that 90% of the women who have abortions are
Catholic, and that 70% have some high school education.
There are also regional differences in abortion rates. Metro Manila has the highest
rate at 52 per 1,000 women. This figure is almost double the national average.
The rest of Luzon has a rate of 27 per 1,000 women, while Mindanao and Visayas
have a similar rate of 18 and 17 per 1,000 women respectively.

Post-abortion complications
Based on Guttmacher Institutes estimates, at any given year, more than 78,000
women seek post-abortion care in a medical facility and 800 to 1,000 Filipino
women die of abortion complications.
This high number of abortion-related hospitalizations and deaths is due largely to
the unsafe methods that women resort to.
According to the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, women employ a
variety of methods to induce abortion. Some women resort to plant and herbal
concoctions (pamparegla), abdominal massage (hilot), insertion of objects (such as
catheters, hangers, and brooms) in the vagina, and ingesting Vino de Quina and
other liquors.
Others also try to induce abortions by hitting their bellies, exercising intensively,
and jumping from high places. Cytotec, a drug used to prevent stomach ulcers, is
also commonly used to induce abortion.
Only a third of Filipino women receive a dilation and evacuation or vacuum
aspiration, which are the medically prescribed procedures for terminating a
pregnancy. And because abortion is illegal in the Philippines under Section 2 of the
Revised Penal Code, clinicians deny and sometimes even scorn those who request
for a safe abortion.
Core issue: unintended pregnancy
Experts in the field of reproductive health stress that unintended or unwanted
pregnancies lie at the heart of high abortion rates. Women, they argue, are only
pushed to induce abortions because they cannot bear the cost of raising a child.
This argument is backed up by research in the Philippines and other countries that
show the primary reason for having an abortion is economic (and not the stigma of
out-of-wedlock pregnancies, as we are inclined to think).
Women who already have children and wish to limit the size of their family or space
their childrens births grapple with this choice more intently.
In the Philippines, it is believed that 22% and 24% of married and single women
respectively have an unmet need for contraception. This means that these women
do not want to have a child but have no access to modern contraception.

A direct consequence of this is that almost half of pregnancies among Filipino

women 15-45 years of age are considered unintended, according to a study. This is
equal to 1.3 million unplanned births every year.