Leave No Narratives Behind: Genuine representation in SRHR discussions matter!
by: Maurice Angeli, member of the Young Advocates for SRHR (YAS)
People mostly call me ‘Mau’ in our community, and I started my youth advocacy journey at age 15. As a youth leader and a campus journalist, I was immersed in working with children and young people. My background exposed me to the lived realities of young people – a reality of stigma, victim blaming, abuse, and neglect.
I grew up in a small town in our coastal town of Liloan, located at the tip of the Visayas region in the Philippines, where people live close to each other. In towns like ours, different kinds of stories travel fast between the townsfolk. “Nanay na si Nene” (The girl is a mother already), they say. They were just stories at first; they were stories exchanged in hushed tones, knowing that the matters of young people’s sexual and reproductive health are never meant to be discussed openly. Until it happened within my friends and my circles – to our relatives, schoolmates, and even dear friends who were much younger than I am.
We were barely teenagers back then, kids who had just graduated from elementary school. With everyone too busy exchanging whispers and glib remarks, all of us kids had no one to address the curiosities we had in our young minds – How did it happen? Can that happen to me? Who takes care of the kids with kids of their own?
In a country mired in a problematic healthcare system, the injustices experienced by many young women with early pregnancies permeate in different areas of society. Back home, these young women receive harsh treatment from local health facilities. Amid their fears and burden of sudden responsibilities they had to bear as young mothers, they were still subjected to harsh scolding and victim-blaming while seeking the reproductive health services that they needed the most.
In 2021, the Government declared teenage pregnancy as a national emergency [1]. Yet, it’s almost as if they are not being treated as such. Are the concerned duty-bearers and national agencies aware of their narratives and struggles? How would they feel about young mothers being denied care, degraded, and left alone? Stories like these do not even reach the local newspapers; even more so make it into the national headlines.
As a young advocate, I will not allow these stories to land on deaf ears.
How can I continue to raise awareness among young people about our right to quality healthcare services and SRHR programs when in the first place, there are countless barriers to exercising those rights brought by systemic problems? Our dire situation in attaining the full realization of our SRHR has ignited my resolve to demand for equitable implementation of healthcare services and accountability to the people in power, and I want to shed light on the plight of young people and teenage mothers in our small town into various essential spaces and accountability mechanisms.
Bringing in perspectives as a young woman from the rural areas who hails 1,015 km away from the country’s capital, where stories of girls even younger than me who were deprived of SRHR information & services and have then undergone adolescent pregnancy prevalently occurs behind the alarming figures that we see on studies, the utmost responsibility to see to it that our real narratives are not left behind was at the forefront of my driving force on engaging in the 2022 YAS Advocacy Planning Workshop.
Girls like me from the coastal areas on a small island in Visayas usually don’t get extended these opportunities because we live too far from Manila, where the policies and services usually get discussed and agreed upon. Were our voices even heard and our situations taken into account during the crucial decision-making processes? Have they also thought of us on the fringes who get the most impacted by every decision that they make at the national level? To bring our stories & first-hand experiences into these advocacy spaces and to ensure that our concerns as girls in the rural areas are not put on the back burner have propelled me to speak with courage in every opportunity that I could get, however sparse and limited it may be.
I am immensely thankful to the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR) for generously extending this avenue to young advocates like us to be capacitated on advocating for our sexual and reproductive rights, including our right to access safe abortions, which is undeniably still a foreign concept for most of the members of our communities, including young people. Indeed, the fight has just begun to clamor for the full realization of our SRHR, as YAS envisions a world where young people are empowered with cognizance to decide on all matters surrounding our SRHR.
Read: Working with Young People
Being surrounded with such talented and brilliant fellow youth SRHR advocates inspired me further to think outside the box with the resolve to take action and inculcate changes, because the lives and sexual & reproductive health & rights of the Filipino youth are on the line.
As we continue to demand accountability from the government, we must always remember that genuine representation in SRHR discussions matters. We must never stop in ensuring that no one, especially the marginalized sectors of young people, is left behind, and this can be achieved through our active and meaningful inclusion so that policies and programs are responsive to our SRHR needs as young people. The fight to achieve sexual and reproductive health for the Filipino youth is still far from over; that is why we need young people’s voices and actions now more than ever.