A tribute to the mothers of the RH struggle

 

I learned activism through the women’s movement—the movement my feminist mother has dedicated half her life to (the other half has gone to her family). Feminists are my team. As 2012 closed, we won a 15-year-old struggle for reproductive health amid bullying from supposed virgin men of cloth who deigned to dictate to women the terms of their sex lives. I must admit, I gloated when the RH Bill became the RH Law, and I was happy to see the CBCP lose. It was, admittedly, a breech in magnanimity, but this breech was a result of a generous appreciation of my life’s heroes.

 

Activism is autobiography in action. We attach ourselves to causes not just because they are important, but also because they resonate with us. Though we defend them with certainty, the advocacies we choose are rooted in the inevitable accidents and coincidences of political life.

 

While advocates of bastard Marxisms insist on “genuine” struggles, which those committed to the working class can “discover,” the humble advocate is happier to feel one’s way through the ethics of everyday life. Feeling, of course, entails loving, and that act bends the objectivity of the rational advocate. Despite this, we value subjective affect more than objective detachment.

 

As an activist and academic in search for the big answers to the big questions, I have identified with various political labels, and many of the isms I’ve subscribed to have been jettisoned in rending moments of self-doubt akin to romantic rejection. I have, however, always been a feminist. I view myself—a bit presumptuously but with utmost sincerity—as a son of the women’s movement. Which means my feminist heroes are my mothers.

 

In college, I interned for an NGO called Linangan ng Kababaihan Inc. (Likhaan)—an organization recently maligned by my favorite moustached senator for being a conduit in a neo-Nazi international conspiracy to rid the world of Filipinos. Likhaan’s chair of the board is my biological mother, Dr. Sylvia Estrada-Claudio, and its executive director, Dr. Junice Demeterio-Melgar (Tita Junice), is one of my RH mothers.

 

Working for Likhaan, I realized how easily women’s rights could be threatened in this country. In the summer of 2006, the RH movement was on the defensive. After successfully delisting the morning-after-pill on the false pretense that it was an abortifacient, the extremist religious organization Abay Pamilya set its sights on banning the Intra Uterine Device (IUD). My task was to aid in a defensive PR campaign against our local Taliban. We wrote petitions to politicians, roped in columnists to write about the IUDs, and organized rallies and talks. We won a defensive battle that summer, but we didn’t advance the RH struggle. The major victory was six years away.

 

I learned a lot during my internship at Likhaan, from basic PR to advanced bishop-bashing.  And as much as I hate to sound like a Ted Talks/self-help huckster, I learned leadership. As executive director, Tita Junice rarely issued direct orders, and she never berated a subordinate. She simply worked harder than everyone else, making the lazy ones (myself included) feel guilty through example. Even non-Catholics can mobilize Catholic guilt.

 

During the final push for the RH Bill, Tita Junice served as convener and spokesperson for the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network (RHAN), the civil society network that made RH the most popular legislative advocacy in recent memory. RHAN was broad and inclusive, and it was its almost anarchist ethos that allowed it to attract everyone from free-thinking secularists to liberal Catholics.

 

When we occupied the House of Representatives for six weeks in late 2011, Tita Junice went to camp everyday. At the end of each day, long after many of the celebrities, legislators, and young activists had left, she would be planning the next day’s events. Or she’d be washing dishes.

 

Always beside Tita Junice was Nanay Lina Bacalando, a community health worker from the urban poor area of Apelo Cruz in Malabon. Nanay Lina lived in SB Park outside the House for the entire duration of Occupy for RH, only going home once a week to wash clothes. Along with other women from urban poor areas, notes Likhaan youth coordinator Kiko dela Tonga, “they’d brew coffee for those who stayed up late and cook breakfast for those who slept.” This was a feminist social movement—complete with an ethics of care that macho bishops, who go to rallies with exclusive tents for the clergy, can never replicate.

 

In her final speech for RH, the crusading Senator Pia Cayetano made mention of mothers like Nanay Lina who were simultaneously the soul and the muscle of the RH movement. They are the ultimate proof that RH is pro-poor. “Kung hindi para sa mahirap ang RH, bakit mahaba lagi ang pila sa mga urban poor areas kung saan kami namimigay ng RH services?” Nanay Lina would ask interlocutors. She has been seeing long lines for condoms and pills since 2000, when then Manila Mayor Lito Atienza imposed a contraceptive ban in his city.  She has also witnessed the maternal deaths that Senator Tito Sotto refuses to acknowledge. Senator Sotto was afraid to debate me. I suspect he would have been more afraid of Lina Bacalando.  

As a historian, I should write people into history a few years after the fact. But if I may, I’d like to do my small bit to write them in now. They deserve nothing less. Mothers like Tita Junice, Nanay Lina, and the heroic women of Likhaan (Joy Salgado, Mina Tenorio, and Ellen San Gabriel) should factor into a Philippine history of small people. For it is the small people that topple the giants with rings, who cruise around in Pajeros. These women defeated the monolithic CBCP. I feel nothing but admiration and love.