Unsafe Abortion Kills, Harms Thousands of Filipino Women but Safe Abortion Website Blocked in PH

Although illegal, hundreds of thousands of women in the Philippines undergo induced and unsafe abortion each year. For many of them, initiatives like Women on Web are a lifeline. But Internet providers in the Philippines have blocked access to its website, thus depriving women of medically accurate, nonjudgmental information and care.

EVERY March, the Philippines marks Women’s Month with proclamations, government forums and tributes to female achievers. Banners go up. Speeches are made. The rhetoric of empowerment fills the air.

Meanwhile, Filipino women trying to access Women on Web — one of the few online resources offering medically accurate, non-judgmental information about safe self-managed abortion — are met with error screens. Several of the country’s internet service providers are blocking the site. No government agency has publicly claimed responsibility and no official has been made to answer for it.

For reproductive rights advocates, the timing is almost too bitter to be ironic. Women on Web’s online service was censored in the Philippines in early December 2025, leaving thousands without access to critical abortion information and care. The Philippines became the sixth country where Women on Web has been blocked.

The organization, a Canadian nonprofit that facilitates online consultations and provides information about the safe use of abortion pills, launched an anti-censorship mirror site at women-on-web.ph, though that site faces the same risk of being blocked. Its pill-mailing service to the Philippines remains suspended. Women in the Philippines can still reach the main site at womenonweb.org through a VPN, the Tor browser, or by changing their DNS settings, and can contact the organization directly at info@womenonweb.org.

“This is not the first time the Women on Web site has been censored,” said Venny Ala-Siurua, the organization’s executive director, in a statement in February. “Censorship will not stop people from seeking abortions, and it is vital that they can continue to access accurate information as they source medication elsewhere.”

A Rights Violation Hiding in Plain Sight

Rights groups argue the blocking is not merely a digital inconvenience — it is, in itself, a human rights violation. Under international law, access to reproductive health information is not a privilege – it is a right.

Blocking a website does not reduce the number of women who need abortions. It reduces the number who can find out how to survive one.

The CEDAW Committee, which monitors compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a treaty the Philippines has ratified, has explicitly stated that the criminalization of abortion constitutes a form of gender-based violence and a violation of women’s sexual and reproductive rights, and has urged states to repeal all legislation that criminalizes abortion. Cutting off access to information about a health procedure that over a million Filipino women seek every year pushes that violation one step further.

In 2015, CEDAW found that a Manila municipal ban on modern contraception constituted a grave and systematic violation of the convention, adding international pressure for the implementation of the RH Law. Advocates say the website blockage is legally and morally of a piece with that kind of state interference. Both restrict what women can know and do about their own reproductive lives.

Women on Web frames digital rights and unrestricted access to abortion information as inseparable from sexual and reproductive freedom, a position increasingly supported by international human rights bodies. The UN Human Rights Committee, which oversees the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — another treaty Manila has signed — has condemned absolute abortion bans as incompatible with international human rights norms.

Women on Web data shows that people in the Philippines sought information and care online not only to navigate legal barriers, but to manage prohibitive costs, maintain privacy, reduce stigma, and pursue their education and work. One Filipino woman who contacted Women on Web described what the combination of criminalization and censorship looks like from the inside: “My partner left me and he didn’t hand me any financial help. I also tried looking for abortion pills here in our country, but some are fake. I also got scammed. I ran out of money.”

Illegal, But Far from Rare

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To understand why the website matters, it helps to understand the reality the website was navigating. Abortion is a crime in the Philippines, fully and explicitly. The Revised Penal Code, enacted in 1930 under American colonial rule and rooted in 19th-century Spanish law, makes no exceptions: not for rape, not for incest, not for severe fetal impairment, not even when the pregnancy threatens the mother’s health rather than simply her life. Under Articles 256 to 259 of that code, physicians and midwives who perform abortions face penalties ranging up to 20 years in prison when violence is involved, or up to 12 years otherwise. Women who undergo the procedure face two to six years. Medical and midwifery licenses can be permanently revoked.

The law has not stopped abortions. It has only made them more dangerous.

A 2022 study published in The Lancet estimated that 1.1 million induced abortions occur in the Philippines annually, a number projected to keep rising. The Guttmacher Institute, drawing on hospital records and health provider surveys from earlier years, estimated 560,000 abortions in 2008, rising to 610,000 in 2012. By any count, the Philippines has one of the highest absolute numbers of abortions in Asia. Nearly all of them are clandestine and, thus, risky.

About 1,000 Filipino women die each year from abortion complications, and tens of thousands more are hospitalized. Poor women, rural women and young women are particularly likely to seek abortion under unsafe conditions. The Center for Reproductive Rights has documented the methods they resort to: intense abdominal massages by traditional midwives, catheters inserted into the uterus, medically unsupervised ingestion of misoprostol obtained off the black market — often counterfeit, sometimes fatal.

The Shadow Economy of Quiapo

Journalists have documented the black market for abortion pills in the Philippines, including in a 2005 New York Times report written by then Philippine correspondent (and now Rights Report Philippines editor) Carlos Conde. The setting was Quiapo’s Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene in Manila, where vendors openly sold herbal abortifacients and pills from stalls that also carried prayer candles and religious images. 

Nothing has fundamentally changed. The Quiapo church’s own rector, Monsignor Jose Clemente Ignacio, confirmed as recently as 2012 that vendors were mixing abortion-inducing drugs in with religious items for sale — tucked into fanny packs, passed across counters between statues of saints. Back in 2011, Ignacio was already calling the area “the hub of the Cytotec trade in the country,” rallying thousands of parishioners in a march to Manila City Hall demanding action. The rallies came and went. The vendors stayed. Patrick Winn, reporting for “The World” in 2017, found that the Quiapo herbalists and pill vendors operated like any other illegal drug network, using coded language, bribing police and enforcing a strict code of silence among themselves.

The most common reason women in the Philippines give for seeking an abortion is economic: they cannot afford to raise another child. The law offers them no safe option. The blocked website offered them, at minimum, accurate information. Now that too is gone, at least through normal internet access.

The Church, the State and the Silence

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines has long set the outer boundaries of what reproductive health policy in the country can achieve. The Church not only condemns abortion but opposes the use of modern contraceptives, a position embedded in national law and promoted by many local and national leaders. It helped gut the country’s landmark Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012, which promised universal access to contraceptives. Pro-life groups with Church backing used legal maneuvers to stall the law’s implementation for five years. What remained was a version stripped of any penalties for local officials who refused to implement it; enforcement is left entirely to individual conscience.

The international community has long recognized that restrictive abortion laws do not reduce the number of abortions. They force women to seek clandestine and unsafe procedures, which kill them. Blocking a website does not reduce the number of women who need abortions. It reduces the number who can find out how to survive one.Women on Web says it will not stop finding ways through. The organization has joined forces with feminist groups in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand to form the Miso Miso Alliance, aimed at strengthening the abortion rights movement across East and Southeast Asia. (Rights Report Philippines)