MANILA — Built in the late 1500s by the Spaniards, Quiapo Church is one of the most

prominent symbols of Roman Catholicism in the Philippines.

Located in the center of Manila, right along a busy boulevard with side streets teeming
with bootlegged DVDs, Filipinos who pray for miracles flock to this church. Inside is a
supposedly miraculous life-size statue of Jesus carrying the cross.

To hundreds of Filipino women every year, Quiapo Church provides a solution - some
say another kind of miracle - to a specific predicament: unwanted pregnancy.

Every day, pregnant women go to this church not only to pray but to buy abortion drugs
from the dozens of stalls that surround it.

"You could say we provide instant miracles to women," said a 58-year-old vendor, who
agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity.

For years now, the woman said, she has been selling herbs and certain abortifacients
right outside the church's main entrance, barely 20 paces from the Monument for
Children, a representation of a fetus outside the womb, cherubs, Christ's wounded
hands and a sobbing mother.

Today, Quiapo Church has become almost synonymous with abortion. It is a testament
not only to a people's abiding faith but also to one of the more tragic facts in Philippine
society, where abortion is illegal and the Roman Catholic Church condemns any woman
who has one. But more and more women are undergoing abortions, and more and more
of them are dying because abortions are largely clandestine and unsafe.

Precisely because of the enormous power of Roman Catholicism - more than 80 percent
of Filipinos are Catholics - the government does not have a clear policy on abortion.
Filipino politicians never mention it in their public pronouncements except to condemn
it. Meanwhile, reports of women dying or hospitalized because of induced abortion, or
of fetuses found in garbage dumps, are becoming more common.

In some instances, fetuses are dumped in and around Catholic churches in the mother's
belief that it would save the child's soul. Reproductive-rights groups believe, however,
that it is done to spite a church that condemns women who abort their pregnancies.

Some hospitals refuse to treat women for abortion-related illnesses like profuse bleeding
because, as one health official put it, "they look at these women as sinners." In a few
instances, according to women's groups, doctors have performed postabortion dilation
and curettage without anesthesia as a punishment for these women.
Official estimates put annual abortions at 400,000 to 500,000, and rising. The World
Health Organization estimate puts the figure at nearly 800,000, one of the highest rates
of unsafe abortions in Asia.

Seventy percent of unwanted pregnancies in the Philippines end in abortion said Jean-
Marc Olivé, the country representative of the World Health Organization. One of four
pregnancies in the Philippines end in abortion, according to Pro-Life Philippines, an
anti-abortion group.

According to the Department of Health, nearly 100,000 women who have unsafe
abortions every year end up in the hospital.

The Philippines, with its high population growth rate (2.6 percent) and low rate of
contraceptive use (an estimated 35 percent) also has an increasing number of teenage
pregnancies. As many as 17 percent of all unsafe abortions are done on teenage or young
mothers, according to the Department of Health.

Compounding the problem is the fact that 36 percent of Filipino women become
pregnant before marriage and 45 percent of all pregnancies are either unwanted or ill-
timed, according to the World Health Organization.

There are "a lot of unmet needs regarding family planning or planning and spacing
pregnancies in the Philippines," said Olivé of the WHO. "Families, it seems, would like
at least one child less than what they have."

About 4 in 5 abortions in the Philippines are for economic reasons, according to a survey
by the University of the Philippines. In many cases, said Jocelyn Pacete, a spokeswoman
for Likhaan, a women's health group based in Manila, "the mother can't afford another
child, so ends up choosing her five living children over the fetus in her womb."