“Bill to Increase Access to Contraception Is Dividing Filipinos - Star News Online” plus 3 more

Bill to Increase Access to Contraception Is Dividing Filipinos - Star News Online
Hope for perilous pregnancy - NorthJersey.com
Robeson Pregnancy Rate Prompts Mentoring Effort - CBS 2 Chicago
Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Candlelight Prayer Service - Columbia Daily Tribune

Bill to Increase Access to Contraception Is Dividing Filipinos - Star News Online

Posted: 26 Oct 2009 12:24 PM PDT

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.

"When I had my third child, I swore to myself that I will never get pregnant again because I know we could not afford to have another one," Ms. Judilla said in a recent interview at her home in Pasig City, on the eastern outskirts of Manila.

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines. Birth control and related health services have long been available to those who can afford to pay for them through the private medical system, but 70 percent of the population is too poor and depends on heavily subsidized care. In 1991, prime responsibility for delivering public health services shifted from the central government to the local authorities, who have broad discretion over which services are dispensed.

Many communities responded by making birth control unavailable.

More recently, however, family planning advocates have been making headway in their campaign to change that. Legislation before the Philippine Congress, called the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act, would require governments down to the local level to provide free or low-cost reproductive health services, including condoms, birth control pills, tubal ligations and vasectomies. It would also mandate sex education in all schools, public and private, from fifth grade through high school.

Supporters of the bill cite urgent public health needs. A 2006 government survey, which interviewed 46,000 women, found that between 2000 and 2006, only half of Filipino women of reproductive age used birth control of any kind. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization based in the United States that researches reproductive health policy, 54 percent of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines in 2008 were unintended.

Most of those unintended pregnancies — 92 percent — resulted from not using birth control, the institute said, and the rest from birth control that failed. Those unintended pregnancies, the institute says, contributed to an estimated half-million abortions that year, despite a ban on the procedure. Most of the abortions are done clandestinely and in unsanitary conditions. Many women resort to crude methods like those Ms. Judilla tried.

The bill's main proponent in Congress, Representative Edcel C. Lagman, also says there is a need for a check on population growth in the interest of national welfare. The Philippine population is estimated at 98 million and is growing at more than 2 percent annually, one of the highest rates in Asia. "Unbridled population growth stunts socioeconomic development and aggravates poverty," Mr. Lagman wrote in an op-ed column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer recently.

But attempts to make reproductive services more broadly available have met resistance, leading to the defeat of several bills in Congress over the past decade.

The main opposition in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country has come from the church and affiliated lay organizations, which say the proposed law would legalize abortion. In churches across the country, signs have been posted that read: "Yes to Life! No to RH Bill!"

One organization, the Catholic Alumni United for Life, said in a position paper that the legislation would promote abortion by financing abortion-inducing drugs, and therefore "violates explicit Catholic teaching."

The Rev. Melvin Castro of the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, an arm of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said the Catholic Church and the laity would fight the bill, if passed into law, up to the Supreme Court.

"The Constitution is very clear that the state should protect life from conception up to its natural end," Father Castro said."Regardless of their religion, Filipinos are God-fearing and family-loving. This bill will change that culture."

Still, proponents of the bill are optimistic, noting that this is the first time such legislation has won the support of the House committee on health. Previous proposals never even made it into committee. They also cite public opinion surveys that show support for the bill and hope it can be passed before the current Congress adjourns in June.

It seems certain that debate over the legislation will heat up with the approach of national elections in May.

Already, the church has issued statements calling on Senator Benigno Aquino III, expected to be the opposition's presidential candidate, to oppose the bill. Mr. Aquino, the son of Corazon Aquino, the late president, who was extremely close to the church, has said he will not do this.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is barred from running for another term, has been sending mixed signals about her position. In previous statements, however, she has said she will let her Catholic faith guide her.

"My faith has a very, very strong influence on me," she said last year.

Other politicians, particularly those on the local level, have chosen to side with the church. In 2000, Jose Lito Atienza, who was mayor of Manila at the time, issued an executive order ending government-financed birth control in the capital. Condoms and other contraceptives were removed from government clinics and hospitals. Patients who asked for them were turned away.

Mr. Atienza, who is now the environment secretary, defends his order as "the right thing to do."

"Contrary to what many are saying, that policy was meant to protect women, to protect their wombs from those who want to take away life," he said.

Passage of the reproductive health bill would automatically nullify Mr. Atienza's order, said Clara Rita A. Padilla, executive director of EnGendeRights, a nonprofit group that supports the bill. "The poor women of this country need this law to protect them," she said.

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Hope for perilous pregnancy - NorthJersey.com

Posted: 26 Oct 2009 10:33 PM PDT

MILWAUKEE — It's a decision that an expecting mother should never have to make: Abort your unborn child and save your own life or deliver the baby and face possible death a few days later.

Those were the awful choices facing Terrilyn Priessnitz a few weeks after she became pregnant with her first child earlier this year.

Priessnitz, 36, developed shortness of breath in March and a short time later was told she had pulmonary hypertension, an often fatal lung disorder.

Along with the diagnosis came a terrible statistic: Women with pulmonary hypertension who give birth face up to a 50 percent chance of dying shortly after the baby is born. The usual recommendation is to abort the pregnancy.

"It was hard, the thought of ending it," Priessnitz said from her bed at Aurora Sinai Medical Center, a few days before she gave birth last week. "Either I have this baby or there are no babies."

Sterilization advised

Medical literature is replete with warnings about the combination of pulmonary hypertension and pregnancy.

The combination is so dangerous that women with the condition are advised to be sterilized.

Not found in the published annals of medicine is an aggressive treatment devised by a Milwaukee doctor that may allow women like Priessnitz to safely deliver their babies.

The protocol developed by cardiologist Dianne Zwicke, who practices at Aurora St. Luke's Medical Center, now has been used on 45 pregnant women with pulmonary hypertension, mostly in Milwaukee, all of whom survived along with their babies.

The treatment, which involves timing the delivery with the condition of the heart, could have worldwide implications for women with the disease. At least 100,000 people are known to have pulmonary hypertension in the U.S. and women are more than twice as likely as men to have it.

The key to the protocol is to constantly use ultrasound to monitor the condition of the right ventricle, the chamber of the heart that pumps blood into the lungs. Those echocardiograms are used to determine when to induce birth, although Zwicke does not allow the women to go beyond 36 weeks.

The women also receive IV diuretics to drain excess fluids, and are given other drugs. They are admitted to cardiac intensive care immediately after the baby is born and stay there for at least three days.

Doctors familiar with Zwicke's protocol warned that while it is promising, it is too preliminary to recommend it to women who are deciding whether to give birth.

"The risk is unacceptably high even if it [mortality] is only 10 percent," Uri Elkayam, a professor of cardiology and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. "If you continue the pregnancy and deliver, you can die."

Poor prognosis

Pulmonary hypertension, which has several known causes but often develops for unknown reasons, is a condition in which the blood pressure is abnormally elevated in the pulmonary artery, the major vessel taking blood from the heart to the lungs. Priessnitz's pulmonary hypertension was caused by an autoimmune disease that formed blood clots in her lungs. While most of the larger clots have been dissolved, Priessnitz will be on blood thinners for the rest of her life.

The condition makes the heart work harder, a workload that becomes even greater because of the demands of pregnancy and giving birth.

Published reports place the maternal death rate at 30 percent to 56 percent, usually within 10 days of delivery.

Even for those who don't become pregnant, the disease has no cure and the overall survival rate is poor, traditionally about three years from the onset of symptoms. However, several promising new treatments have become available in recent years and some people now can live with the disorder for 15 to 20 years. A lung or heart-lung transplant may be the only option for some patients.

Zwicke said that in addition to the women she has treated here, she also has consulted on several cases in other countries, all 45 with the same outcome: survival of the mother and baby. Still, she said, her approach should not be used to assure women that they can safely deliver their babies. All the same, she said she does not tell women they have to terminate their pregnancy.

On Sept. 28, about 36 weeks into her pregnancy, Priessnitz was induced. About 4 a.m. Sept. 29, a cesarean section was performed.

Zwicke said late last week that mother and child were doing well.

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Robeson Pregnancy Rate Prompts Mentoring Effort - CBS 2 Chicago

Posted: 26 Oct 2009 09:36 PM PDT

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Robeson Pregnancy Rate Prompts Mentoring Effort

CHICAGO (CBS) ―

Click to enlarge: Robeson High School in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood.
CBS

Sometimes a story serves as a call to action.

After CBS 2 reported 115 girls out of 800 at Robeson High School in Englewood were pregnant or already had babies, women in the community decided to do something. They say they're responding to a crisis situation, and they think their knowledge will be power. So they're taking their wisdom into schools to walk with young girls on the path to adulthood.

They want to show them there's a world of possibilities for them beyond young motherhood.

One of the schools that's welcoming them is Benjamin E. Mays Academy.

Its principal, Patricia McCann, saw the story about Robeson's situation.

"It made me a little sad," she said.

She commends Robeson's principal for working with the girls. But because it's so hard, she says preventive measures are also important.

"Let's try not to let 'em get in that position," McCann said.

Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, is working to get them the info they need. His project sent our story to thousands of women, with a call for mentors.

It turns out, women are answering that call. Many of them filled a room tonight.

"We have a crisis in our community," Sherrie Phillips said. "We must stand up and go out there and do something about it."

They want to show young ladies the way. Their work will target grade school girls. Their mission: To send prevention messages.

"I'll tell 'em you have to be yourself," volunteer Jinnie Rogers said. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Use protection if you're not going to use abstinence."

They say getting the word out early is better because by high school, sometimes it's too late.

Principal McCann has seen that in the neighborhood.

"They have a backpack and a baby, and they're trying to do all that," she said.

She says it is a tough road they don't have to take. It's why she's welcoming the mentors to her own Benjamin Mays Academy, a Robeson feeder school.

The Black Star Project hopes to have enough mentors to expand beyond Robeson and the South Side. It's calling on men to get involved, too.

If you'd like to help, call the Black Star Project at 773-285-9600.

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Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Candlelight Prayer Service - Columbia Daily Tribune

Posted: 26 Oct 2009 09:50 PM PDT

MOPS (mothers of preschoolers) is sponsoring a special ceremony to help parents celebrate and remember tiny lives lost to miscarriage, still birth, and infant death. This candlelight event is open to anyone and childcare is provided upon request. The event takes place on Tues, Oct 27, 2009 in McMurray Chapel at Missouri United Methodist Church at 19:00pm. Please consider attending this event if you have experienced a loss or would like to support a friend or family member. For more info. or childcare contact Kelli at 445-0616.

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