NY Times - "Bill to Increase Access to Contraception Is Dividing Filipinos"

[TomCADem]

If the GOP gets its way, we can be like other countries that out law abortion and are hostile to contraception. Abstinence only is the official line in Philippines:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/world/asia/26iht-phils.html

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MANILA — Gina Judilla already had three children the first time she tried to terminate a pregnancy. “I jumped down the stairs, hoping that would cause a miscarriage,” she said. The fetus survived and is now an 8-year-old boy.

Three years later, pregnant again, she drank an herbal concoction that was supposed to induce abortion. That, too, failed.

Three years ago, in another unsuccessful attempt to end a pregnancy, she took Cytotec, a drug to treat gastric ulcers that is widely known in the Philippines as an “abortion pill.”

What drove Ms. Judilla, a 37-year-old manicurist, to such extreme measures is a story of personal tribulation familiar to many Filipino women. She and her unemployed husband are very poor — barely able to buy vitamins for their youngest child, let alone send more than two of their older children to school.

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