Last week, Malacañang took the opportunity to celebrate what it deems to be the Philippines' shining record in dealing with the rights of women. The celebration cited the fact that many women have achieved great success in areas such as the judiciary, the legislature, and indeed the executive branch where the most powerful person of her gender now reigns.

Unfortunately, Malacañang's boosters chose to ignore the fact that in the area that counts the most, the Philippines is considered a dismal laggard. This is the area of reproductive health rights.

While the Filipino woman does have a chance at better education than most Asians of the same sex, she also has a greater chance of dying from childbirth-related causes than almost any other Asian woman. This is due not only to the lack of health care facilities, but more importantly because most women who are poor lack access to appropriate information and education about reproduction and sex matters.

While many Filipino women achieve prominence in business and the arts, more than one and a half million of them have unplanned or unwanted pregnancies each year. This is not only because of lack of information but mainly due to the absence of well-funded programs for the provision of family planning services at most levels of the health system especially the national level.

Although we have many women judges and police officers now, Filipino women stand a 20 percent chance of being physically or emotionally abused by their partners regularly. While cultural and educational factors play a role in this phenomenon, programs (such as women and children protection units in hospitals) to reduce and mitigate such violent gender-related behavior are either not in place or inadequately supported, or, in some instances, have actually been dismantled.

Lamentably, the sad state of reproductive health in this country can be traced directly to the present occupant of the seat of power in Malacañang. As soon as she took power in 2001, even while paying lip service to the notion of gender equality, the present administration took strong steps to dismantle past efforts to strengthen family planning as well as women and child protection programs.

Appropriated funds for these purposes were diverted to Catholic-linked groups who were actually opposed to the programs. Emergency contraception for women at high risk for unwanted pregnancies was banned by the deregistration of levo-norgestrel. Every year, efforts of Congress to formulate effective reproductive health policies through legislation have been blocked by a coalition of Church-linked and administration-backed Catholic extremists. As a result, the present administration has succeeded in crippling what used to be a relatively successful population management and reproductive health service delivery program. The Population Commission, once a potent development-minded agency with considerable national and international support is now an instrument for substituting science for dogma in reproductive health - effectively negating much of its own achievements in the past.

And so, even as the presently beleaguered Arroyo regime frantically looks for optimistic signs - in spruced up economic indicators, in the achievements of individual Filipinas, in the questionable benefits of a strong peso, and in the support of a deteriorating military - the most deprived segments of our countrymen continue to suffer the burdens of an injustice and inequity. The most important and longest suffering of these segments are impoverished women whose children will go hungry because there are too many of them to feed or will not get appropriate health care because it is unaffordable or remain unlettered because there are not enough schoolrooms or teachers to accommodate them.

In fact, many of these children will not even have the love of their mothers as each day twelve of these unfortunate women will die of causes linked to pregnancies they did not want.

***

Even as the Congress is deadlocked in its deliberations on their versions of cheaper medicine legislation, the practices of institutions and individual practitioners continue to burden Filipino consumers with high prices. Recently, the employer of a maid who had an appendectomy in one of the most respected private medical centers complained about this to the administration of that facility.

The complaint cited grossly overpriced medicines and supplies charged by the hospital. The price differential for exactly the same products available at Mercury Drug Stores (the country's biggest retail drug chain) ranged from 50 percent for a 1 gram vial of the anti-biotic, Cefoxitin, to a whopping 490 percent for syringes and needles. The final bill showed an average price differential of more than 100 percent (or double) compared with items at the drugstore.

Regulatory bodies should look into the practices of these important institutions. PhilHealth should consider using its accreditation powers to enforce some discipline and promote a sense of fairness in private health facilities. These are the same groups that threaten "hospital holidays" when confronted with laws that limit their capacity to profit such as the Hospital Detention Act and the "generics only prescribing" provisions of the Cheaper Medicines Act.

***