By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, Contributor
THE RAMONA DIAZ documentary Motherland: Bayang Ina Mo, about the Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Sta. Cruz, Manila, has been a long time coming to the Philippines, Diaz’s own motherland. Meanwhile, it has been winning awards in international film festivals worldwide, including the 2017 Sundance World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Commanding Vision. Diaz points out that the film fest crowd is self-selecting but Motherland is actually readily available through the American Public Broadcasting System’s educational POV platform with a lesson plan and study guide for Grades 9 to 12. There has been blowback from the US Bible Belt. One imagines how a broader Filipino audience might react.
Diaz is better known in the Philippines for her 2003 documentary Imelda. During the Q&A after a rare Philippine public screening of Motherland, one man in the audience remarked that Filipino men should take more responsibility for reproductive health by using condoms or getting vasectomies. That may be wishful thinking as most of the fathers in the film were unable to even be responsible for themselves or their families, being jobless and poorly educated. The women may not be up to it either. There were several scenes of young mothers gingerly handling IUDs, then politely declining their insertion, or backing out right at the operating room doors for a more permanent tubal ligation. They seemed less fazed at the prospect of more mouths to feed and perpetuating their family history of insurmountable poverty. The film’s sympathetic yet unflinching depictions of the irrational dissonance between healthy sexuality and social control made us laugh and weep.
A woman lumad leader told us of how in public hospitals and lying-in centers, women like her were often doubly marginalized and discriminated against, first by poverty, then by ethnicity. She decried the recently enacted punitive rules which forbade traditional midwives or hilot to deliver their babies at home. “For the lumad and katutubo, women’s bodies are sacred,” she plaintively declared.
A seasoned female OB-GYN gently affirmed that all women’s bodies are sacred. She explained that the new rules on delivery in accredited medical facilities are intended to protect mothers against complications during delivery. The Millennium Development Goal which the Philippines signed on to was to lower maternal mortality rates (MMR) to 52 per 100,000 births. We aren’t even close, as the Philippine MMR averages 162. Thus the Fabella hospital statistics on the whiteboard show fewer babies than mothers in the ward.
Not that the Fabella Hospital team are slackers. They are dedicated professionals with an average job term of 25 years. They work under daunting conditions: 60 to 100 deliveries a day; two mothers to a bed in poorly ventilated wards; not enough incubators for preemies which means conscripting the parents as human incubators in the delightful innovation known as KMC (Kangaroo Mother Care). The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes Fabella as a role model hospital “for its essential newborn care programs, which have been proven to reduce infant morbidity and mortality.” The good doctora who had reassured the woman lumad leader also announced to the audience that implants are free at the Friendly Care clinics, and reminded us that reproductive health encompasses so much more than just pregnancy. Diaz’s co-emcee Red Tani of the Filipino Free Thinkers echoed this, adding that we must also advocate for reproductive health justice as well as RH rights — another of the many types of justice and rights more evident in the breach than in their implementation or observation.
An NGO worker observed that the film was anthropological. The world of Filipinos so poor and disempowered that they cannot afford modest medical fees equivalent to a low-end cell phone or even jeepney fare, is far removed from the relatively comfortable middle-class lifestyle of your film festivalgoer, or of the development workers and medical professionals who are well-represented at the Motherland screenings.
Diaz’s film-making style is “immersive.” The subject largely tells the story. Admittedly it is not an entirely objective telling, being mediated by the filmmaker’s own experiences. Her inclinations did inform the cutting of the film.
Another female OB-GYN waxed nostalgic about her residency at the Philippine General Hospital maternity ward, which virtually replicates the Fabella Hospital albeit slightly scaled down.
“Our government officials should watch this film,” she said with a sense of urgency, as the so-called pro-lifers are appealing the recent SC decision lifting the ban on 51 hormonal contraceptives. “They should bring it to the Senate, and make Sen. Tito Sotto watch it.”
