INDAY, 36, is mother to nine children, the eldest girls who are aged 14-16 are prostituted.

Living in one of the slums of Davao City where videoke houses for visiting workers abound, the girls opted to drop out of school and find some source of money. But in a community like theirs, young girls are easily enticed into prostitution.

Inday relies on the salary of her husband as a personal driver, which is just around P300 a day. Of her other children, the eldest boy, aged 13, had also opted to just earn from scavenging instead of spending time in school. This after dropping out several times in elementary grade and was among the oldest boys when he last enrolled in fourth grade.

"Maulaw na man daw siya (He is ashamed to return to school)," Inday said.

Only three are in school, two boys aged nine and eight, and a girl aged 11.
Although she was already made aware of how her elder girls turned out, she can only shed a tear. Helpless.

There is barely food in the home, she said, and have in fact taken out breakfast from their daily fare a long time ago. The rest of the meals are mostly porridge.

The girls, who are now sexually active because of the path they chose are getting some help from a non-government organization here, the Talikala Inc., which helps prostituted women and children. There, with the support too of an organization of prostituted women and children Lawig-Bubay, they learn about their reproductive health and how they can deal with their circumstances as well as some basic life skills. They also learn some crafts in between, but it's difficult for them to leave the trade because the stomach is more often empty.

Outgoing Davao City Councilor Angela Librado-Trinidad, whose long years in the council has seen her pushing for promotion of reproductive health even among the youth insists on the urgency of such national law.

"A lot of our adolescents have become pregnant and marry early because of the lack of reproductive services such as rh education and counseling. With a national policy, we hope to be able to come up with a standard information campaign and perspective on reproductive health," she said in an emailed interview.

"Definitely, RH education and services will not include abortion and massive distribution of contraceptives among the adolescents and most importantly the children," she added, insisting that those strongly opposed to it are attacking it from a wrong perspective.

Lack of proper information has seen the rise of maternal mortality, especially among the young who become sexually active even before their due time.

The ignorance about how the reproductive system works had caused the youth, especially those on the streets, experiment on their own and believe in myths perpetuated by peers who are equally clueless.

"Lahi na man ang mga bata karon, ate (The girls today are very different)," said Jessiel A. Taladua, 15, of Quezon Boulevard, in an earlier interview at the Tambayan Center for Children's Rights Inc., a non-government organization helping streetgirls in three urban settlements in the city -- Boulevard, Agdao, and Bankerohan.

Prodded to describe further what makes the "children" today very different from them, Taladua only went on to say that the children of today start very young.
"Mga nine, ten, naa na sa kalsada; naa na'y barkada (They are now on the streets with their own peers as early as nine and ten)," said the 15-year-old.

Street life to these children bring along vices and abuses, most of the time sexual.

Exposed at such a very young age, the children's reproductive health is put at risk complicating an already complicated battle against maternal mortality.

Of the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) identified by the United Nations, reducing maternal mortality rate by three-quarters between 1990 to 2015 is Goal Number 5.

To achieve this, there must be an annual decline of 5.5% from 1990.

"Maternal mortality has decreased at the global level at an average of less than 1% annually between 1990 and 2005," the report "Maternal Mortality in 2005" by the World Health Organization, Unicef, UNFPA, and the World Bank said.

"Moreover, on the regional basis, none of the MDG regions achieved 5.5% between 1990 and 2005, although Eastern Asia came close to that goal with a 4.2% annual decline," the report added.

Year 2005 estimates from the Philippines placed maternal deaths by 100,000 live births at 230.

As if to echo what Taladua had observed, the 2002 Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality (YAFS) survey of the University of the Philippines Population Institute noted the increase in the number of youths who engage in sex.

The YAFS estimated that premarital sex among the young has risen from 18 percent in 1994 to 23 percent in 2002; of which some engage in even before their first menstrual cycle.

Of these, more than half, or 55 percent of the first sexual experiences were unplanned or which the teenagers did not want to happen at the time.

As such, sexual encounters usually happen even before the teens learn of the health risks involved.

In an earlier interview with Belen Antoque, chairperson of Lawig Bubai, she too noted the increase of minors among the ranks of the prostituted. Last year, they had 30 new members, of which 27 were minors.

Coucnilor Trinidad meanwhile attributes the hullabaloo over sex education in school on the absence of a national policy regarding reproductive health, which thus continues to plague the growing population.

"In the absence of national policy, government agencies are now confused. Case in point, massive distribution of condoms by the Department of Health and sex education by the Department of Education when what we want is a comprehensive and culture and gender-sensitive approach to reproductive health," she said.
Along with government's seeming refusal to make a stand on this concern is the steady increase of infant and maternal mortality, she added, simply because there is no budget or specific program dedicated to this concern.

And with no specific program and budget, delivery by skilled health workers as a means to reduce maternal mortality is likewise left with almost no substantial budget.

"It is recognized that in addition to a range of interventions before, during and after pregnancy, ensuring that all births are attended by a skilled health worker is a key strategy to reduce maternal deaths. On the basis of historical and observational evidence on the association between having a skilled health worker at delivery and reduced maternal mortality (Graham et al., 2001), the proportion of births attended by a skilled health worker, was selected as a proxy measure to monitor the progress towards the MDG 5 target of reducing maternal mortality," the 2008 Updates by the Department of Reproductive Health and Research of the World Health Organization wrote in its "Proportion of births attended by a skilled health worker" report.

WHO data on the Philippines placed birth deliveries by skilled health workers in 2003 at just 59.8 percent.

The rest are attended to by unskilled manghihilots.

This brings on even more complicated problems from a population that is becoming more sexually active at a much earlier age and the denial of proper knowledge from informed sources.

In the meantime, the young continue to believe that jumping up and down after sexual intercourse will prevent pregnancy. And most of the teens engaged in such are just concerned about not getting pregnant.

Most of them do get pregnant though.

At the Tambayan Center, a girl, not even in her mid-teens regularly brings in her months-old baby as soon as the drop-in center opens in the morning.

The girl is among the many children, youth, and families who have made Osmeña Park their home.