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48-year-old Cabenan suffers from untreated gall stones and constant fatigue because her body has never had the time to properly recover from her successive pregnancies/AFP-File

World

Birth control law too late for Philippine mum of 22

The church has continued to resist, warning pro-life politicians they will be targeted in mid-term elections this year and backing various groups’ legal challenges to the law.

Asked to comment on the plight of Cabenan, one of the groups that filed a petition with Supreme Court to strike down the law said her 22 children should be a cause for celebration and not regret.

“Children are never a liability. In fact, in the provinces, the more children you have, the more it is considered a gift,” Serve Life spokesman Anthony Lanicao told AFP.

He also said couples with so many unwanted children were “partly at fault” because they should have checked their sexual urges.

For Cabenan, however, church leaders are partly to blame.

“They tell you to go forth and multiply, but now when you ask for help, they just pass you by,” she said.

She said nobody taught her proper family planning methods and there was no easy access to free contraceptives in Baseco.

Cabenan met her husband, Danilo, when she was in high school, and he, a struggling teenage docker in Manila’s tough port area.

She soon dropped out of school to be with Danilo, now 50, in a union that quickly resulted in successive births that dashed her ambition of one day becoming a teacher.

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“It is very difficult to have many children… many times we sleep without eating,” she said.

Cabenan also mixes up her children’s names and birthdays.

But she said the most difficult and painful part was failing to provide basic medical care to her children.

Of the 22, five died young due to diarrhoea, a treatable disease that constantly plagues the slums, because they had no money to buy medicines or take them to hospital.

Six of the surviving 17 children are males, while the rest are females.

Six of the eldest are either married or have children out of wedlock – and nearly all of them squeeze in a house cobbled together from bricks, drift wood and tarpaulin that is the size of a small garage.

Cabenan said most of her children were delivered at home by midwives, although one was born on a bus and another by a roadside with the help of passers by.

Her husband has no permanent job and finds construction work anywhere he can. Only three of the children are studying. None of the older ones were able to finish high school.

“If we had this law in the past, maybe we would have had a better life today,” she said.

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