SEEKING FERTILITY ADVICE IN AN INFERTILE COUNTRY

The whole of Manila must have been on holiday during the three-day Ninoy anniversary weekend, me included. My husband had to attend a meeting in Singapore, and I figured that I could very well see a fertility doctor there. When we closed The Manila Times in 1999, people asked me what I would do next. I said, "Have a second baby." It’s been four years and the project hasn’t gotten off the ground. Our baby project sounds more like a government infrastructure project.

And just like politics, fertility – or infertility – is one topic where people will always have a say about or suggest some solution to. Of all suggestions I’ve heard, nothing frightens me more than dancing in Obando or taking this black or maroon-colored Chinese potion that probably tastes like castor oil. Okay, okay, all I said was that the thought frightens me. I didn’t say that dancing and taking the potion don’t work. The best suggestion I’ve heard is to take a vacation and relax. In fact, fertile or infertile, taking a vacation is always the best way to relax. Just don’t pile up a load of credit card debts.

There are few good fertility clinics in Manila, but as they say, if you can afford it, why don’t you go the US, Singapore or Belgium? Besides, I had a free hotel stay, thanks to my husband’s business trip. People would say you are crazy not to seek help abroad if you can afford it. Since I was already in Singapore, I figured that I might as well spend a few minutes seeing the fertility doctor before people call me crazy. Well, at my age, you can probably guess what the doctor said. But then this is not what my article is all about. It is just ironic that, as a friend in Singapore said, "you are seeking fertility treatment in an infertile country."

Indeed, the day I flew to Singapore, August 21, The Straits Times, Singapore’s national daily, had just announced that this year, their birth rate may fall to its lowest in 26 years. Only 37,000 births are projected for 2003. That means that there will be fewer babies born this year than there were in 1977. The main reason, if I can recall, is that raising babies in Singapore has become quite expensive. Go tell that to a Pinoy and we’ll most probably say, "Don’t they realize how wonderful having a kid is?" My answer to that is that we can be philosophers only when we are able to feed all our children.

In the August 24 issue of The Straits Times, a related article says, "...one in five married couples here find it hard to conceive, said fertility expert Christopher Chen in a Straits Times report in January." Whatever the reasons are, here in the Philippines, it seems that the opposite is true - we have so many babies – and there is a never ending debate on our population policy.

Whether it is our overpopulation that causes poverty or not, you know that it is poverty that drives some women to take thankless jobs. Believe me, I was surprised to enter a bar in Singapore and see the place full of Pinay GROs. I didn’t realize that Singapore had bars with GROs, much less Pinay GROs.

The guy who took me there was my good friend, schoolmate and former martial law jailbird Roberto "Bobby" Coloma, now Singapore bureau chief of Agence France-Presse, the giant news wire agency. Bobby was my editor at The Philippine Collegian, UP’s official student organ, where I was a sports writer. That was way back in 1980. My leftist colleagues used to call me a kapitalista, but I was really one, so how could I complain? Bobby was already a brilliant writer when I met him, and it was he who taught me how to write in a concise, crisp manner. He got rid of my long, winding sentences. He did not care whether I lived behind the four thick walls of Forbes Park; if my piece was terribly written, he would say so. One day, I noticed that my articles were literally getting chopped to give way to anti-government pieces, which eventually was the reason that several of the Collegian guys (with the notable exception of two of us who were in the harmless Sports Section) were all hauled off to Camp Bicutan one day.

Not only did Bobby teach me to write, he also introduced me to the real world. One night after we closed that week’s issue, he asked me to go with him and four other colleagues to the pre-war Liwayway printing press near Raon to see how our paper was being produced. At that time, it was all done in the slo-mo letterpress system, with workers in sandos typing characters on bits of molten metal. I still cannot imagine at this day and time how a paper could ever get printed on time. After the press visit, Bobby brought everyone to this sleazy theater called GOP in Malate, decades before it became a fashionable district. I was shocked, while my male colleagues and the rest of the audience were laughing, as a woman performed an exotic dance, as they call it these days. All part of my college education.

So for old times’ sake, Bobby (who always mistakes me for a journalist when I have been a shopkeeper for the past 20 years) took me to a bar near his Singapore office where an all-Pinay band performs. It was ironically a Singaporean who had brought him there earlier to show him "your kabayan," and he did the same to me. He wanted me to see a side of Singapore which is not well known back in the Philippines. These are the Southeast Asian equivalent of Japayukis.

Our kabayan GRO ladies, mostly dressed in black, sexy outfits, were earning a living entertaining and flattering Singaporean men – the very same guys who are unable to produce babies despite government appeals for couples to have bigger families. One of the girls was from Cebu, but after I tried to interview her for this piece and told her I was also from Cebu, she suddenly vanished. She probably thought I’d tell her mom where she’d gone to. But the real reason she left us, I think, was that she saw the ever-devaluating peso sign on our faces and decided that we weren’t worth her time. So off we went, Bobby and I, to have drinks and dinner at a trendy Indochinese bar and restaurant along Club street, where old Chinese shophouses have been restored and converted into chic establishments.

Later that evening, on the walk back to the car, we entered what seemed like a Chinese medicinal shop, but when I asked for fertility herbs, the sales ladies smiled and said it was a tea shop. We got free tea, however, in tiny paper cups. We crossed the street to visit a lovely Hindu temple, but there were no signs to show which was the fertility god, so I did not know which god to pray to.

And so here I am, back in my very fertile country, trying to defy my biological clock to have another baby. Wish me luck.