This is for all you people who still continue the tradition of fear-mongering and condemnation against poor women who choose artificial contraception.

I want you to step into someone else’s shoes for a few minutes while I paint you a mental picture. You are not an independent yuppie with a promising career. You are not a comfortable housewife with a well-to-do husband. You are not a college graduate. You are not a celibate man. You are not a young artist trying to promote your craft.

You are a 19-year-old mother of 2.

You grew up in a poor urban area of Manila, with your mother, 7 brothers and sisters, living in a 20 ft x 20 ft space (already quite a luxury in your squatters’ area). Your father died of tuberculosis after your youngest brother was born, leaving your mother to take care of 8 children with a laundrywoman’s meager earnings. 

Now your two children, aged 2 years old and 4 months, are added to that number. 

None of your siblings finished high school. You had to stop after freshman year because your mother could no longer afford the jeepney fare for everyone. The youngest only finished 1st grade. Instead of going to school, he now spends his days begging for coins from cars stopping at a nearby intersection.

You got pregnant at 16 which was, you realize now, a huge mistake. You were forced to marry your first boyfriend, to appease the moral sensitivities of your mother, and soon after the birth of your firstborn you were already pregnant with your second.

Your husband does occasional carpentry work to put food on the table while you watch the children at home. But much of his income is gone by the time he gets home after payday.

He comes into the shack, smelling of rum and cigarettes. You yell at him for using the money that was supposed to be for food on alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. He defiantly screams back that he has the right to spend his own money however he wants.

Later, as you lie awake on your makeshift floor mat, wondering how on earth you are going to pay for your next meal, he climbs on top of you. 

Knowing full well that you can’t afford to feed, clothe and educate the 2 children you already have and fearing another pregnancy, you push him away. He repeatedly tries to coerce you but you firmly rebuff his advances.

So he strikes you, not for the first time. After a couple more sharp slaps across the face – it’s not as bad as last time, mercifully – you just let the tears flow as he painfully “asserts his marital rights” on you, still stinking of rum. 

Just a few feet away, behind a ragged curtain draped over a wire, your young siblings are awake, listening to all of it. Their first exposure to the idea of sex was in this way.

9 months later, there is yet another mouth to feed. Another child who will not be able to finish school. Another child who will grow up deprived of medical care, proper nutrition, dreams, goals, aspirations bigger than himself.

And it kills you inside, every day…knowing that this cycle is just going to repeat itself over and over, for you, for your siblings, for your children, for your children’s children.

Now put your own shoes back on. It’s so much easier to pretend that this is all just a work of fiction, isn’t it? But this is the reality that many impoverished women face daily. Yes, DAILY.

It’s so easy to say “contraception is just going to promote promiscuity.”

It’s so easy to say “women who want to take pills or get ligations are just sex maniacs.”

It’s so easy to say “this contraceptive mindset is contributing to the continuous degradation of the Filipino family and our religious morals.”

The fact of the matter is this: contraceptives, when used properly and responsibly, will prevent pregnancy more than 90% of the time.

[This is what those who are against it use as an argument, that it is not 100% effective. Will it follow, then, that we should not use an umbrella because our shoes will still get wet?]

But for the 90% of successful uses, and absolutely for those who have a tubal ligation, a poor mother can at least be relieved of the added responsibility of another child that she cannot afford every time her husband forces himself on her. That already makes a huge difference in her life.

My aunt’s household helper, who was married to her driver, had a tubal ligation after her second child. They both came from poor families but with their combined incomes, they were able to send their children to school and both of them finished college. They are now working abroad and are able to support their elderly parents who sacrificed so much to make sure that they and their future generations could have a brighter future. They can be doctors, lawyers, artists, engineers, anything they want to be. That was the end of the poverty cycle for them. If they had had 8 children, there is no way that they could have done it.

Every single urban poor family who made it out of the squalor has that in common: they do not have more children than they can afford.

And you say contraceptives are useless, or evil? Or that it’s a married couple’s own fault for not practicing abstinence?

You, in your nice, air-conditioned homes, with ice in your glass, reading this on your iPhones, tapping away with your aura of self-righteousness?

You know nothing.