On paper, the sentence is imprisonment, up to six years. In the dank back rooms of Manila slums, and in the emergency wards of public hospitals, the sentence can be death. In 2008, at least 500,000 women resorted to abortion. 90,000 suffered complication. A thousand died.
The criminal was a woman. They are always women.
In the Republic of the Philippines abortion is illegal. There are no exceptions under the law. It does not matter if the woman’s life is at stake on an operating table in the Fabella Hospital. It does not matter if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, if the expectant mother is a nine-year-old girl in the slums of Tondo, if the fetus is expected to die within the womb and the woman with it.
That the penalty of abortion is often death is not a secret from these women. They know this. They’ve seen it happen. Women who risk death are not concerned with the legality of their actions, they are willing to push the twisted end of a plastic hanger into their uteruses; they believe they have no other choice. They may be afraid of God or death or the arm of the law, but they will carry on. The criminal penalty meant to stop abortion has not stopped millions of women; it has only stopped them from seeking help when they are bleeding into the cheap wood floors of their makeshift homes. Criminalization has pushed them into the streets of Quiapo, outside the Church of the Black Nazarene, where the voices of priests echo in prayer and tablets of Cytotec are sold six for a thousand alongside plaster statues of the Virgin Mary.
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