In the name of "public service," local media practitioners in the Philippines have established names for themselves in delivering exposés—bringing various issues and events to full public scrutiny through police accompanied raids and bust operations.
With the advent of smaller and mobile technology, many of these "bust operations" have also taken on the mode of "hidden surveillance," with the media directing the police to sting operations they arranged themselves. No doubt, the "public's right to know" is touted in many, if not all such cases of media excursions.
Unfortunately, in local politics, technology, surveillance and even the media's act of publicly exposing "wrongdoing" has proven insufficient in the face of scandals involving corrupt public officials, or massive cheating in the national elections.
On the other hand, for cases of abortion, whether individual women resorting to clandestine abortions or clinics suspected of conducting them, media bust operations have always served a very clear purpose: keeping the issue of abortion in its place—that is, the place it has long occupied in the public discourse: crime/sin/sexual immorality.
Last Saturday, a local news feature program aired side-by-side separate raids of a drug colony, child sex trafficking and a traditional birth attendant accused of instructing a pregnant woman to take Misoprostol.
Like past raids, and coverage of such raids, the media went through the usual motions of hidden camera angles, barging into the alleged clinic and including shots of the police waving around the illicit matter. In this case, tablets of Misoprostol, medicine for gastric ulcers, which—while legally available in the past—have been withdrawn from registration in the Philippines since 2002.
Confronted with her misdeed, the sixty-year old birth attendant and councilor, Corazon Matic offered her only defense: "I wanted to help, I couldn't refuse them" (referring to pregnant women who approached her for help with unwanted pregnancy). She was later charged for dispensing an unregistered drug.
As concerned as they are about crime and punishment, or even the public's right to know, often the purpose of media and police raids on "suspected abortion clinics" has little to do with actually preventing clandestine abortions, or even informing the public about how Misoprostol works, why it is very popular locally and how it is different from hormonal contraception. After all, in the local public discourse, "abortion" remains shrouded in myth, despite available empirical data. For this reason, raids and abortions remain staples of sensational media alongside prostitution and drugs.
Elsewhere of course, the protocol for medication abortion is RU-486 or Mifepristone. However, the celebrated "abortion pill" is not widely available. (Misoprostol is also used either with Mifepristone or Methotrexate in combination.)
Off-label use of Cytotec (the brand name for Misoprostol, developed by Searle) for medication abortion has been documented in the Philippines since the late eighties, when Cytotec was still widely available as a prescription drug for gastric ulcers. Making its way into the black market, Cytotec also reportedly became widely available in Quiapo, Manila, where stalls plying all sorts of herbal medicine—including local concoctions called "pamparegla" (literally to induce or regulate menstruation)—were strategically located just outside the Quipao Catholic church.
In 1994, the Department of Health issued a Memorandum order regarding the off-label use of Misoprostol, and by 2002 it was totally withdrawn from the market by Searle.
Yet it is not surprising that the drug remains locally available, given the local situation. Despite its illegal status in the Philippines since the Spanish occupation (the current penal code is adopted from the 1897 Kodigo penal), the Guttmacher Institute estimated in its 2006 published study that 473,000 abortions occur annually in the country. This means that one third of women who experience an unintended pregnancy, resort to abortion.
Womenlead's Executive Director, Attorney Claire Angeline P. Luczon, raised her concern about the manner in which media approaches the issue of abortion:
"It is unfortunate that with all the influence accorded it today, media is unable to deliver the most important facts when it comes to abortion. Studies have shown that it is usually poor mothers who already have three or more children who resort to abortion, yet we never hear media reporting about these women's lack of options or why they were not able to prevent the pregnancies in the first place."
Since it was founded in 2000, Womenlead has also given legal assistance to a number of health practitioners and clinics targeted by similar media-led exposés.
Yet in 2005, media also fed the frenzied threats of a pro-life mayor in Manila, giving him live TV coverage as he threatened to have an NGO (nongovernmental organization) run clinic shut down and its staff arrested by Manila police, for providing family planning services (distributing condoms and pills) to his constituents.
Indeed, in having framed abortion so narrowly, the media has also unwittingly served the cause of misinformation. The former mayor equates all manner of contraception with abortifacients (yes, even the condom).
In 2003, Womenlead filed a case to re-register Postinor, an emergency contraceptive pill which was registered in 1999 and promoted by the Department of Health for use in rape crisis centers. The same argument (classifying it an abortifacient) was used against the EC pill, which consists of regular hormonal contraceptives—in this case, levonorgestrel.
"In 2005, the Experts' Committee formed by the DOH upheld our petition, accepting our legal and scientific arguments, but by that time, the original registration applicant had already backed out and expressed no further interest in taking the application again," recalls Luczon.
The Secretary of the Department of Health set aside the petition, caving in to political pressure and refusing to make a ruling as to the substantive recommendation by the Experts Committee.
Indeed, local sensational accounts have proven strategic for conservatives, serving to blur the lines between contraception and abortion, while also taking away the focus from the women who take untold risks and now face even fewer options.
