One qualifying observation
[QUOTE=GoodEnough; 1173142]Most Filipinos, at least those whom I've met, understand nothing of church dogma, have never studied philosophy and simply aren't capable of examining the belief structure for themselves to determine what they will or won't accept.
We find it absurd that Filipinos can reject birth control and family planning on mis-understood religious grounds (and the church strongly endorses such misunderstandings) , while freely engaging in endless sex. They however, see no contradiction at all in the practice. GE[/QUOTE]I would offer one qualifier to this thesis. If you impose the variable socio-economic status or even simply household income on fertility rate (number of births the mother experiences) there is a marked decrease in the size of families for families that are better off economically. Does this mean well-to-do families are simply having less sex? Maybe; sex is one of the few inexpensive pastimes available to families without money, although it is inexpensive only in the short term. But I suspect frequency of sex does not account for all of the vast difference in fertility rates. Professional families often have no more than two or three children, but in poor families in the provinces it is not unusual to find families with ten or a dozen livebirths. I have had conversations with professional Filipinos and Filipinas in which they talk quite objectively about the realities of Catholic expectations about contraception, on the one hand, and their education and understanding of the science of contraception, on the other. In the end, many higher socio-economic women are using contraceptive practices in private and simply not talking about it. I don't know how much soul searching is involved, but I think many Filipinas do find a way to distance themselves from the Church's teachings on contraception.
I think GE's thesis is essentially correct for most lower socio-economic Filipinos, and it is from their ranks that women end up in our embrace of sex for money. And they do not, as he points out, see any contradiction in their actions.
I do know of one former WG who was practicing the trade after having had a tubal ligation. After three children she simply decided no more. She heard about a clinic in a nearby city in the Metro Manila area that provided the procedure at relatively low cost, confided in only one girlfriend, and went with her friend to the clinic. If I recall her story correctly the surgery cost less than 1000 PhP (but for a poor woman even that is a lot of money) , was short on privacy and amenities in the operating room, and turned out a string of tubal ligations in the course of an afternoon. The woman went home via a bumpy jeepney ride after no more than an hour recovery. She was in pain and bleeding but refused to tell others, including her mother and sisters, what she'd done. She later found out her mother had previously had the same procedure done some years earlier. These women had sixth grade educations, but they somehow heard about the clinic that provided these serial sterilization surgeries, and they arrived at their decisions to have the procedure while sharing their fears and intentions with a very small circle of confidantes. The fact that this clinic existed and that these relatively uneducated women learned about them and acted on their knowledge suggests that some Filipinas, even poor ones, are capable of stepping outside Catholic dogma. It is probably also relevant that these women confronted the realities after they already had three and four children, respectively, to care for. Perhaps the majority of our working girls are in the two or fewer children category.
