PHOTOS: Why The Philippines Has So Many Teen Moms
Editor's note: Hannah Reyes Morales began photographing teen moms in 2017. Aurora Almendral reported this story in October and November 2019 and updated the text in light of the pandemic.
At 12 years old, Joan Garcia liked leaping into the sea and racing the boys to the nearest pylon. She liked playing tag. When she started having sex at 13, she thought it was just another game. Joan was skipping across the pavement, playing a game with friends, when an older neighbor noticed her rounding belly.
Her daughter, Angela, is now a year old. Joan crouched on the floor, folding up her lanky teenage limbs, and fed Angela fingers-full of steamed rice, crimped strands of instant noodles and fermented anchovies from the family's small communal bowl.
Joan, now 16 years old, said since she became a mother, she's embarrassed to play kids' games, then paused for a moment. "Sometimes I still play tag in the water with my brothers," she admitted.
Each year, 1.2 million Filipina girls between the ages of 10 and 19 have a child. That's a rate of 24 babies per hour.
And the rate of teenage pregnancy is rising. According to the most recent data, collected every ten years, in 2002, 6.3 percent of teenagers were pregnant; by 2013 it had gone up to 13.6 percent.
Last August, the Philippines' economic development agency declared the number of teenage pregnancies a "national social emergency."
The pandemic has made the situation worse. With Manila under a strict lockdown — including limited access to medical facilities, no public transportation and harshly-enforced rules on not going out — access to birth control has been severely curtailed, particularly for teenagers, said Hope Basiao-Abella, adolescent reproductive health project coordinator for Likhaan, a non-governmental organization that works on women's health and access to contraception.
The University of the Philippines Population Institute in 2021 — an estimated 751,000 additional unplanned pregnancies due to conditions created by the pandemic.
