When the tiny island nation of Malta voted to allow divorce in 2011, Melody Alan realized that her own strongly Catholic country, the Philippines, was the only one left in the world without that right (aside from the Vatican). Last fall, as the #MeToo movement began to ripple out from the U.S., she and fellow advocates for divorce seized the moment and tried to recast the debate.
Ms. Alan’s own husband left her and their two children for another woman in 2010. He offered to support an annulment of their marriage (an elaborate court or church procedure) but only if she would pay the entire cost—more than a year’s worth of her schoolteacher’s salary. “I wanted to be free of him and call myself a free woman, but I couldn’t,” she told legislators in February, when a parade of women appeared before a committee of the country’s House of Representatives. Some recounted abuse at the hands of their husbands, abandonment to a life of poverty and single motherhood with no chance of remarriage. Last month, a divorce bill cleared the House of Representatives for the first time. It heads to the Senate in May for what is sure to be a contentious debate.
Ms. Alan and her allies copied the #MeToo playbook, which has brought sustained attention to sexual-harassment and abuse allegations in Hollywood, the media and politics. They organized rallies and social media campaigns with hashtags such as #DivorceForthePhilippinesNow and #WeSupportDIVORCEPh, inviting women to share their stories of broken homes and of marriages from which they couldn’t escape. The goal, Ms. Alan, said, was to show that the activists were aiming to help desperate women, not to antagonize the Church.
“People talk about sexual harassment and gender issues now, and I think politicians want to listen,” said Risa Hontiveros, a senator lobbying reluctant colleagues to vote for the change. She noted that Filipinos are particularly aware of what happens in the U.S., where many have strong family connections. The #MeToo campaign “has made a huge difference, to be able to tap into this global movement,” said Ms. Alan. “Because of #MeToo, we came out much tougher than before, and our opponents can see we were for real and not just some group on Facebook.”
‘People talk about sexual harassment and gender issues now, and I think politicians want to listen’
In the Philippines, where 80% of its 100 million people are Catholic, support for divorce rights has been growing for years, from 43% in 2005 to 53% in a poll last month. Some 20% fewer couples married in 2015 than in 2005, official statistics show, with many preferring cohabitation to entering a marriage contract they can’t easily escape. “It’s too much of a risk if it goes wrong,” said Estelle Morado, 28, who has a 2-year-old daughter with her partner.
But opposition to divorce remains strong in some quarters. The former U.S. colony has long been a conservative Catholic bastion; before Americans arrived in the late 19th century, it was colonized by Spanish friars. Contraception is still contentious, and the only legal means of ending a marriage is by an annulment—which entails a declaration that the union was never valid, usually because of some pre-existing psychological impediment.
In the Senate, the bill is likely to face more resistance. Its members, such as former world boxing champion Manny Pacquiao, often invoke their religious beliefs when it comes to making policy, and Church officials and lay followers are preparing strategies to protest the proposal. Some senators, such as majority leader Tito Sotto III, suggest that making annulment a more streamlined, accessible process would be better than legalizing divorce.
On annulments, the church says it is doing its part: Pope Francis in 2015 introduced plans to make annulments easier and free globally, and recently instructed bishops to provide annulments if they are satisfied that a marriage has broken down beyond repair. “We are moving faster to accommodate demand than the secular authorities,” said Father Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the public affairs office of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. A bill is moving through the Philippine legislature to make church annulments valid under civil law, too.
The women’s campaign is determined, however, to win the right to simpler, cheaper civil divorce. Pia Cayetano, deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, had her marriage to her ex-husband annulled by a court order in 2013, after a long struggle that she described as dehumanizing. “Part of the process,” she said, required that the two parties accept that they were not “capable of love.” But that wasn’t the reality: They simply weren’t in love anymore. “Why can’t we acknowledge that?” she said.
A spokesman for President Rodrigo Duterte, who was raised Catholic but has had an uneasy political relationship with the church, has said that the president opposes the bill. But those familiar with his thinking say that he is unlikely to stand in the way of a divorce law if it reaches his desk. His marriage to his first wife was annulled in part because of his own infidelity in 2000.
Write to James Hookway at james.hookway@wsj.com
Appeared in the April 28, 2018, print edition as 'Philippine women’s new PITCH for Divorce.'