MANILA, Philippines -- Abortions in rural areas are rampant because women in the countryside do not have access to sufficient family planning information and maternal health care.

Rural women made this report to the bishops and members of pro-life organizations in the recently concluded National Rural Congress II, where they aired their worries over the lack of health care in the regions.

Susanah Reyes, research director of the Asian Social Institute, said the rural women who attended the Congress testified to the members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) that abortion, a crime in the Philippines, has been prevalent in the rural regions, where women tended to have less access to family planning and maternal health care facilities.

Mary Racelis, a Philippine Daily Inquirer contributor from Ateneo de Manila University’s Institute on Church and Social Issues, who also attended the meeting, said the women who participated in the discussion were eager to share their experiences and became emotional and vocal in their testimonies.

Reyes and Racelis said there was a heated debate between the representatives from the academe who issued provincial reports and members of pro-life groups.

According to Racelis and Reyes, some participants opposed the use of the term “reproductive health care” because of connotations that it permitted abortion.

In the end, the participants agreed to use the terms “maternal and family health care.”

But for the rural women, terminologies are secondary. Reyes said they wanted acknowledgement that abortion has been happening in the country side because mothers have not been getting the support they needed from the government.

Reyes said the women could not give statistical data – terminating pregnancy has always been taboo in the predominantly Catholic Philippines – but they shared plenty of “qualitative” data.

Although the participants had no numbers to present, their testimonies were important because they provided another aspect to the increasingly heated reproductive health and population management debate.

When all was said and done, making the voices of poor women heard was still difficult, Reyes said.

“They were saying, ‘to us, abortion cases really do happen in the countryside,” Reyes stressed.

The women, who were mostly community leaders, got their information from the grassroots.

“They were unreported cases. There was no quantification. But of course, they don’t tell health workers that they had an abortion,” Reyes said.

“They were experiential accounts, ground reports,” she said, which was a “valid” research method.

According to the women participants, many mothers in the provinces do not have the right information on family planning matters before and after their pregnancies, resulting in unplanned pregnancies.

There is also the lack of social support from the government, which makes life difficult for them.

Since many of them already had children and could not afford another one, unwanted and unplanned pregnancies were terminated, Reyes said.

Racelis said rural women often went to hilots (informal midwives) and herbal healers when they wanted to stop the pregnancy.

The statements from the rural women reveal that reproductive health is not a black-and-white issue, a Church-versus-the secular world matter, according to reproductive health advocates.

The women also agree with the Catholic Church’s teachings that abortion is a sin, according to Reyes. When a bishop asked the women if they were open to Christian values formation, Reyes said the women readily agreed to it.

Many of women who underwent abortion were desperate and treated abortion as the last option, she noted.

“They lacked information on family planning and how it is to become a better Christian,” Reyes said.

Five bishops attended the discussion, but Racelis said they did not speak much. Mostly they listened, she noted.

The NRC II organizers had yet to issue an official commitment to the women participants on this specific issue.

In a press conference on Monday, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, the NRC II convenor, said they supported the women’s campaign for maternal health care and agreed that some mothers underwent abortion “out of desperation.”

“I think it’s a human problem and the Church has to confront this problem,” the Cagayan de Oro prelate said.

The Catholic Church and some legislators are currently warring over a consolidated bill in the House of Representatives, which calls for a national reproductive health policy.

The Church said the proposal would open the floodgates to other anti-life methods, while lawmakers said the bill would save the lives of mothers and curb population growth.