Not Everyone’s Sunshine: Class, Poverty, and Who Reproductive Rights Actually Protect
Content Warning: This article contains discussions of abortion, pregnancy loss, sexual violence, and description of unsafe medical procedures.
Before Antoinette Jadaone wrote Sunshine (2024), she first sat with women and listened. Poor, young mothers who had been pregnant when they could, rather, should have been something else first. Students, daughters, girls, all still figuring out what they wanted from a life they did not fully consent to.
Jadaone interviewed these women and let their stories sit in her. Then, what she came away with was not a sermon about morals or an argument about life, but something confoundingly quiet. “In a third world country,” she said, “choice is a privilege.” The film that followed eventually won the Crystal Bear for Best Film at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. But Jadaone’s haunting statement is where this essay begins.
The RH Law’s Broken Promise to Filipinas
The Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 (RA 10354) was only passed after fourteen exhausting years of what can only be described as a hegemonic war (congressional walkouts, Supreme court delays, bishops on television, women in the gallery, amongst others). When it finally became law, it promised “universal” access to contraception, maternal care, family planning, and sex education. The RH law also made sure to give special attention to poor and rural Filipinos. For many young girls, it felt like being seen for the first time.
The Bulletin of the World Health Organization noted that access to contraception here in the Philippines had declined. The margin between the poorest and the wealthiest women, though, stayed as wide in 2022 as it had been in 2013. Filipinas in the lowest wealth quintile are still 28.7% more likely to have unmet contraceptive needs than Filipinas in the highest. The law moved the national average. It did not move for the poor.
Hence, this essay argues that the Philippine reproductive rights conversation has been conducted far too long as a theological debate, when it really should be examining class.
The Harsh Realities of the Abortion Ban
Frankly, the RH law does not touch abortion. In the Philippines, this act has been criminalized for more than a century, originating from the Spanish Penal Code of 1870 and carried forward into the Revised Penal Code of 1930. A woman proven to have undergone the procedure, and all those involved, may face up to six years in prison, regardless of rape, incest, or fetal impairment incompatible with life. The absolute prohibition, applied now for over a hundred and fifty years, simply turned abortion into an underground scheme that kills marginalized Filipinas.
Every year, an estimated 1.1 million induced abortions occur in the Philippines, resulting in roughly 1000 preventable deaths from post-abortion complications. This trend is driven by a high rate of unwanted pregnancies among those in the lowest income brackets. This is what thousands of poor women are dying from. Otherwise, a privileged Filipina navigates this taboo through entirely different channels. She may travel to Cambodia or find a private physician. Where resources are scarce, she may obtain misoprostol at a heavy price, from a shady source.
In Jadaone’s film, 19-year-old Sunshine scrapes together five thousand pesos and performs the abortion alone in a cheap motel room in Avenida. Even the LRT’s point-blank noise right outside her window cannot interrupt the moment. In any meaningful sense, Sunshine’s experience is composite reportage from the interviews Jadaone conducted with real Filipinas. A poor woman has to take the risk with her own body because the state has made every safer option unavailable to her.
Post-abortion is indeed acknowledged and technically protected under the RH law. A Filipina who has undergone an abortion is entitled to medical treatment without being denied care. However, one study in Manila documented cases of healthcare workers denying pain medication to post-abortion patients and even going so far as to berate them in public hospital wards.
While the RH law promises to protect the Filipina, a theology older and crueler than any legislation decides how little her life is worth. The Catholic Church’s grip on Philippine lawmaking has been the single most powerful force behind this. First by blocking the RH Law for fourteen years, and now by refusing any measure of abortion reform. Yet there lies irony in the fact that Spain, the country that colonised these islands in the very name of God, has since granted women full legal authority over their own bodies, recognizing abortion as a fundamental right. If only the Philippines had an inviolable doctrine of the separation of the Church and State.
On abortion, the clearest legislative proposal currently before Congress is the Act Decriminalizing Induced Abortion to Save the Lives of Women, Girls, and Persons of Diverse Gender Identities. Advocated by the Philippine Safe Abortion Advocacy Network (PINSAN) and Atty. Clara Rita Padilla, the bill argues that the archaic criminal prohibition of abortion must be repealed based on public health data and human rights law. So far, that argument has not succeeded. Every year it does not, countless women unnecessarily die from underground procedures that a different legal framework could have prevented.
No Sunshine Should Be Alone
What Jadaone found in those interviews was more so about desperation and helplessness. Each woman had carried the weight of an unwanted pregnancy by herself, without a system to support her. The question that the Sunshine director returned to was not if these women made the right decision. It was why the country decided for them, only to completely abandon them.
Reproductive rights should not be something a woman has to earn through privilege; whether it's through income, or the luck of being born into a family that can openly discuss bodily autonomy during dinner. Imagine a Philippines where a girl asks sex advice from the school nurse without a wave of shame breaking over her. Where a woman in a far-flung barangay is told her options, all of them, by a professional whose job is to serve her without judgment. Much less, where a 10-year-old rape victim is not forced to carry a pregnancy to term because of a Spanish theological law written in the 1800s.
That Philippines is possible. It is also illegal right now. No woman should have to walk the streets by herself in Quiapo just for some pamparegla drugs. No woman should have to insert said drugs into her genitalia and almost bleed to death in a motel since the state would much rather enforce a colonial law than value her life. No woman should have to beg a doctor to save a 13-year-old stranger, one dying for similar reasons, only to be denied.
Reproductive rights, in its truest and most basic form, is about a free woman living in a community that supports her; no matter how much she earns, where she lives, or whatever she is trying to decide. Filipinas have been asking for reproductive rights in cramped hospital beds, dirty school bathrooms, and loud streets for more than a century. It is time the country learned to answer.
References
ABS-CBN News. (2021, February 9). 10-year-old mothers recorded in Luzon as gov’t sounds alarm on girl pregnancies. https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/02/09/21/10-year-old-mothers-recorded-in-luzon-as-govt-sounds-alarm-on-girl-pregnancies
Center for Reproductive Rights. (n.d.) Philippines’ abortion provisions. https://reproductiverights.org/maps/provision/philippiness-abortion-provisions/
Elliott, V. (2020, June 9). The Philippines’ underground world of abortion drug sellers. Rest of World. https://restofworld.org/2020/philippines-abortion-social-media/
Estrada, M. A. G., Cheng, K. J. G., & Lacaza, R. M. (2024). Legal changes and evidence on unmet need for contraception, Philippines. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 102(11), 778–785. https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.23.290577
Jadaone, A. (Director). (2024). Sunshine [Film]. Project 8 Projects; Anima Studios; Happy Infinite Productions.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2025, July). Dialogue with Spain: Experts of the Human Rights Committee commend measures making abortion a fundamental right, ask about measures for the protection of minors. United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/meeting-summaries/2025/07/dialogue-spain-experts-human-rights-committee-commend-measures-making
Panaligan, A. (2025). Regla dust: The five stages of a pregnancy scare. Everything’s Fine PH Press.
Perez, J. R. M., Monteagudo, G. R. S., Nebrada, P. J. C., Arevalo, M. V. P. N., De la Paz, E. P., Ho, F. D. V., & Padilla, C. R. A. (2023). The spectre of unsafe abortions in the Philippines. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, 32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2022.100655
Yambao, M. (2022, December 10). PINSAN calls to decriminalize induced abortion as priority legislation. Philippine Safe Abortion Advocacy Network. https://pinsan.ph/2022/12/pinsan-calls-to-decriminalize-induced-abortion-as-priority-legislation/