Condoms are becoming harder to get than ever in the Philippines and Pinky Serafica of Women’s Feature Service Philippines on why that is:

The Catholic Church is going underground. This pretty much sums up Strategy 2002 of silence and stealth that followed decades of fire-and-brimstone trained on anything that smacked of “family planning.”

Now, women’s groups say that condoms are missing from convenience stores and that some “pro-life” local government units have advised barangay health centers to turn down women asking for pills and reproductive health services, and worse, conservatism is creeping in national governance—all done quietly until one day we will wake up to ask, “where have all the condoms gone?”

I’ve never had any problems asking for condoms, but then that’s me and I’m weird—I know some lower-income ladies who know about reproductive health and rights and where to go to get contraceptives and check-ups for free, but are just too shy to go, and from their stories about friends and relatives they’re hardly in the minority. One woman got pregnant unexpectedly in her late forties and didn’t go to see a doctor at all until she gave birth because she was afraid “they’d think she was horny for having sex with her husband when she was so old.” I mean, WTF.
While I do have problems with the Catholic church in the Philippines being so arch-conservative and teaching its faithful to be so sex-negative, it’s still something I can live with because people have a choice to stay in the church and follow its teachings, the flip side being that they can always leave if they feel it isn’t right for them. What drives me batty is when old men who have never had sex and old ladies who have never enjoyed sex think they have the right to make decisions for everyone in the damn country, including those of us who aren’t Catholic and don’t fall under their jurisdiction. If you have a problem with premarital sex and contraception, fine, then tell your flock not to do the first and to do the second. Trying to remove my rights to contraception because you’re so insecure that your people aren’t following instructions isn’t cool, and neither is making such a big fuss over contraception while never bothering to make a serious stand against other important things that affect women, like spousal abuse and marital rape.