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Health

How the Philippines's Strict Laws Have Driven Women to Seek Backstreet Abortions

In our new documentary 'Year of Mercy,' Jo Fuertes Knight investigates how strict new reproductive health laws are having fatal consequences in the Philippines.

In 2015, the deeply devout Catholic country of the Philippines passed the historic Reproductive Health Bill—a law that would require the introduction of sex education into schools and provide free contraceptives for its poorest women. However, government bureaucracy and religious opposition has meant the reproductive health law is not reaching the women who need it the most. In turn, it is having fatal consequences.

We head to the Philippines, where teen pregnancy and teenage maternal deaths are on the rise, to seek out the limited options that women have when faced with an unwanted pregnancy.