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Alondra gave birth to her second child in mid-April 2022, aged 19
Photo:
Kimberly dela Cruz / THE MIRROR
This year I ended a text with many questions instead of an answer.
These were
so:
Given a choice, would a thirteen-year-old not be a mother?
Or maybe later?
Would she think differently about the future and what she can do with it if those in power in the Philippines let her?
The text is about two girls from Manila, Leng and Alondra, who have become mothers.
Alondra was 19 when I met her in April and had given birth to her second son, Aldrin, five days before we met.
It was on her lap, a bundle wrapped in white cloth.
The firstborn was born when Alondra was 16 years old.
Alexander, she calls him her angel.
The other girl, Leng, lives in a small apartment up a narrow wooden staircase.
She lives with her boyfriend upstairs in a room with a bunk bed in one corner and a toilet in the other.
When we spoke, Leng was 13 years old and six months pregnant.
The belly showed under her red shirt.
She no longer dared to go home to her parents, saying: "I don't know how my mom will react when she finds out about the baby."
Leng and Alondra live in Happyland, a neighborhood nestled against Manila Bay's industrial port
in the capital of the Philippines.
»Hapilan«, which means stinking garbage in the local dialect, is an inhabited dump.
The streets of Happyland are narrow, dark, and a wheelbarrow often just fits through.
It stinks of urine and feces from cats and chickens that roam free.
Happyland is a place where a lot of girls become mothers.
The number of so-called teenage pregnancies is high all over the Philippines, but particularly so there.
The Philippines has one of the strictest abortion bans in the world.
Women who decide against pregnancy face years in prison, as do doctors who perform abortions.
The legislation is driven by the Catholic Church, which has massive influence in the country and represents the vast majority of the country's 110 million inhabitants
belongs.
And the poorer, the less chance of getting help for an abortion, support, medical advice.
At the same time, there is so much shame and ignorance about contraception, sex and birth control that many young people have unprotected sex.
I still thought a lot about the conversations with Alondra and Leng, told my friends about it again and again.
I couldn't get rid of one thought in particular.
He struck me as outrageous at first.
In the end I wrote it in the text: Is the birth of a clean child of one's own particularly powerful where everything one has ever been able to lay hands on is used, soiled, borrowed?
I first met Alondra in front of her house.
Her sister, herself a mother of two sons, listened.
Alondra has 12 siblings.
She said she could have gone to a local organization and gotten a hormone patch before she had her first child to avoid getting pregnant straight away.
But she learned from the elderly, the neighbors, parents, siblings, cousins and the pastor that having a baby is part and parcel of living with a friend.
That it is a gift from God.
When I spoke to Leng, I had the statistics in mind: Teenagers who have a child are significantly less likely to complete school, learn a trade less often, experience violence in marriage or partnerships more often and slide into poverty.
Pregnancy and childbirth are incredibly dangerous for minors, with their bodies not yet fully grown, and are among the leading causes of death in this age group.
If you don't come from Happyland, you will hardly find it.
A slum like a labyrinth, power cables hang at eye level in front of the narrow entrances, barrows and pickup trucks rush past;
the huts and cottages form a wall that visitors can hardly penetrate.
I believe the same applies in the other direction.
Anyone born in here finds it difficult to get out.
The children of the children of Happyland, how are they supposed to lead different lives than their mothers and fathers?
There is one question I often ask first when I interview people.
So that we can get to know each other a little.
And because I find that the answer often says something about who is sitting across from me.
The question is: Tell me, what are you dreaming of?
I asked Alondra the question.
She said that she didn't quite understand the question, didn't have an answer.
Leng said, "You know, actually I wanted to be a stewardess, fly away and see the world.
To Singapore.
I heard it's beautiful there.
Now I'm so scared of giving birth."
Would Leng or Alondra have terminated their pregnancy if given the opportunity?
Perhaps.
Maybe not.
Anyway, I went home from the research in Happyland, away from Leng and Alondra, with the feeling that those who deny unwanted pregnant women in the Philippines or anywhere else the option of safe abortions are real dream inhibitors.
Opportunity preventer at least.
People who cheat girls like Alondra and Leng out of the chance to make one of the most important decisions of their lives.
During the research, I also spoke to doctor Junice Melgar, who has been advocating women's health in the Philippines for decades.
We talked about the US, where the Supreme Court was about to overturn abortion rights at the time.
Which happened a few weeks later.
The Philippines, Melgar said, showed what happens when women are stripped of the legal basis to have abortions.
How difficult it is to reverse such ultra-conservative laws once they are in place.
"As long as abortion is a crime, women are being driven to their deaths," she said.
For example, because those affected would have to look underground for unsafe ways to abort.
The research sharpened my perspective on the subject.
I'm used to the idea that pregnancy and motherhood don't have to follow each other.
But so many women around the world are denied this freedom of choice.
They are going to be mothers, but do they really want to be?
For me it's clear: only those who know the options can really say yes - or no.
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