"The Timeline of Being a Woman in the Philippines" by Janine Mikyla U. Hung

A woman is to live for everyone but herself. By the Philippines’ standards, a woman can only ever be a virgin, a victim, a slut, a wife, or a mother. The timeline of her life starts and ends with her belonging to someone else. 

Virginity is a commodity that can be taken but never returned. Girls are protected from anything in this world that could stain their dignity, their bodies. Her body belongs to the society that will shame her should she ever lose her virginity. 

Despite this, 500 adolescent Filipinas give birth daily. Despite this, adolescent pregnancy is a “national emergency” (UNFPA, 2020). Due to the lack of sex education and the unavailability of contraception, young girls are susceptible to unplanned pregnancies, meaning the very culture that swears by virginity is the same culture that drives them into exploring sex with their own inadequate understanding of it, that leads to higher rates of adolescent pregnancy. 

Rape is her fault. Her body was the only permission they needed after all. She had the responsibility to hide what she didn’t want seen. Her body belongs to those who want it. Her beauty was a tragedy and she must face the consequences. 

One female, or child, is raped every hour in the Philippines (Morales, 2017), and because she is both a female and a child, her odds are even higher. In a country where females are “sexual gatekeepers” (Virtudes, 2020), rape is always the fault of the raped.

Abortion is not a choice. She must take responsibility for her actions, sex has consequences, after all. If it wasn’t her choice to have sex, it is still her duty to harbor life. The fetus’s rights exist too, at the expense of hers. Her body then belongs to the morals of others. 

There are 600,000 women who get an (unregulated) abortion yearly in this nation and 1,000 women would die from the succeeding complications (Aspinwall, 2019). As a Catholic country, the Philippines forces its morals on its women, ensuring their suffering and even their deaths. This nation cries murder when a fetus is aborted, but believes that a woman’s death due to the complications of abortion, caused by their demand that women have no access to such healthcare, isn’t murder. 

Marriage allows her to make use of her body for sex, for the pleasure of the man she pledged her life to. Her body now belongs to him, and him only, to his pleasure and desires. She must renounce her selfish aspirations of an individual life, and she must sacrifice her identity for marriage. 

One in four women have faced violence at the hands of a partner in the Philippines (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2018). Like all those women, it is her duty to stay. Not that she has a choice. When a woman gives up everything, as she is expected to for marriage, she becomes financially dependent on her husband. Economic dependence is the link between the abused and the abuser (Conner, 2014), and in the case of many Filipinas, the link between wife and husband.

Motherhood is how she must use her body as it should be used, like any respectable woman would. “Utang na loob” that a woman who was given life must also create more. Utang na loob roughly translates to debt of one’s being (Enriquez, 1994, as cited by Alampay, et.al., 2012) meaning, as a woman, motherhood is the debt she must repay for her existence. 

Parenthood is something men do. Motherhood is who women are (Katz-Wise, et.al, n.d., as cited by Del Monte, 2022). She is a mother and that is all she can ever be. Her body belongs to the children she bears her husband forevermore. 

This is her timeline as a woman. We, Filipinas, are her. We are treated inhumanely because we aren’t seen as humans, only as bodies. We all have the same “fate” of living this way, for other people, to allow our bodies to be used for and by others. We’re “destined” to suffer the pains of being as we are, women. 

Who gets to decide that? Why have we accepted this fate? Why do we never reach for a future that doesn’t reduce us to just bodies? We do not, but we should. Such is an undeniable fact we must learn to believe. 

The “innate” worth assigned to us because we are women should never take precedence over the value we give ourselves as people.

Sources: 

Alampay, L. P., & Jocson, R. M. (2012, July 29). Attributions and Attitudes of Mothers and Fathers in the Philippines. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3150789/ 

Aspinwall, N. (2019, May 29). Manila’s Abortion Ban Is Killing Women. Foreign Policy. Retrieved from https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/29/manilas-abortion-ban-is-killing-women/

Billing, L. (2018, February 22). In Philippines, Where Divorce Is Illegal, Women Pay the Price. Women’s Advancement. Retrieved from https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/womensadvancement/articles/2018/02/22/ in-philippines-where-divorce-is-illegal-women-pay-the-price 

Colobong, F. J. B. (2020, December 27). Sexual violence in PH: Stuff of jokes, stats of nightmares. INQUIRER.net. Retrieved from https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1376035/sexual-violence-in-ph-stuff-of-jokes-stats-of -nightmares 

Conner, D. H. (2014, February). Financial F Financial Freedom: W eedom: Women, Mone omen, Money, and Domestic Abuse , and Domestic Abuse. Retrieved from https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1380&context=wmjow l 

Del Monte, P. (2022). More Filipino women are delaying motherhood – here’s why. CNN. Retrieved from 

https://www.cnnphilippines.com/life/culture/2022/11/4/women-delaying-motherho od.html

Finer, L. B. (2022, August 24). Unintended Pregnancy and Unsafe Abortion in the Philippines: Context and Consequences. Guttmacher Institute. Retrieved from https://www.guttmacher.org/report/unintended-pregnancy-and-unsafe-abortion-ph ilippines-context-and-consequences 

Gohu, K. (2022, December 13). How Utang na Loob Made Filipino Families Toxic. Modern Parenting. Retrieved from https://modernparenting.onemega.com/how-utang-na-loob-made-filipino-families toxic/ 

Morales, Y. (2017, March 7). One person raped per hour in PH — report. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2017/03/07/One-person-raped-per-hour-in PH.html 

Philippine Statistics Authority. (n.d.-a). One In Four Women Have Ever Experienced Spousal Violence (Preliminary results from the 2017 National Demographic and Health Survey) | Philippine Statistics Authority. Retrieved from 

https://psa.gov.ph/content/one-four-women-have-ever-experienced-spousal-viole nce-preliminary-results-2017-national 

Philippine Statistics Authority. (n.d.-b). One in Ten Young Filipino Women Age 15 to 19 Is Already A Mother or Pregnant With First Child (Final Results from the 2013 National Demographic and Health Survey). Retrieved from https://psa.gov.ph/content/one-ten-young-filipino-women-age-15-19-already-moth er-or-pregnant-first-child-final-results

Umali, J. (2020, June 29). Rape culture exists, so long as the current state exists. Bulatlat. Retrieved from https://www.bulatlat.com/2020/06/25/rape-culture-exists-so-long-as-the-current-st ate-exists/ 

UNFPA. (2020, January). #GirlsNotMoms: Eliminating Teenage Pregnancy in the Philippines. Retrieved from https://philippines.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/UNFPA_Policy_Brief_Teen age_Pregnancy_%282020-01-24%29.pdf 

Virtudes, S. (2020, July 11). Victim-blaming: Why survivors of sexual violence won’t come forward. RAPPLER. Retrieved from https://www.rappler.com/nation/266161-victim-blaming-why-survivors-sexual-viol ence-not-come-forward/ 

Wibawa, T. (2018, October 9). The Philippines is one of two countries where divorce is illegal, trapping women in marriages. ABC News. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-09/the-philippines-is-one-of-two-countries where-divorce-is-illegal/10332600