A BILL seeking to legalize divorce in the Philippines has been revived at the House of Representatives.
Returning Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, the principal author of the Reproductive Health Law, filed House Bill 116 seeking to institutionalize absolute divorce in the country.
“Sometimes, it can even be morally necessary, when it’s about shielding the weaker spouse or young children from the more serious wounds caused by intimidation and violence, humiliation, and exploitation,” Lagman, a human rights lawyer, said.
“While most marriages are supposed to be solemnized in heaven, the reality is many marriages plummet into hell — in irremediable breakdown, spousal abuse, marital infidelity and psychological incapacity, among others, which bedevil marriages,” Lagman added.
A similar measure was filed in the past 16th Congress by former Gabriela Rep. Luz Ilagan but did not even reach the committee level because then speaker, incumbent Quezon City Rep. Feliciano Belmonte Jr., was opposed to the measure.
Lagman explained that “while the State continues to protect and preserve marriage as a social institution, it gives the opportunity to spouses in irremediably failed marriages to secure an absolute divorce decree under limited grounds and well-defined procedures to avoid abuse, save the children from the pain and stress of their parents’ marital clashes, and grant the divorced spouses the right to marry again for another chance to achieve marital bliss.”
Lagman also said that his proposal would provide mechanisms to make the grant of absolute divorce inexpensive.
“The State shall assure that the petition and proceedings for the grant of absolute divorce shall be inexpensive and affordable. Upon application by the petitioner, the proper court may waive the payment of filing fees and other costs of litigation,” Lagman said in his bill.
HB 116 also provides four additional grounds for absolute divorce: “when either of the spouses secures a valid foreign divorce, canonical divorce, gender reassignment surgery, and when irreconcilable differences or conflicts between the married couple are beyond redemption despite earnest and repeated efforts at reconciliation.”
Lagman said his proposal for absolute divorce is “pro-woman.”
“Traditionally, in a marriage relation, the husband is more ascendant than the wife. It is the woman who is usually brutalized and it is the man who philanders and gets away with it.
Lagman also said that “under these foreboding and unequal circumstances, a wife needs an absolute divorce more than the husband.”
“In divorce proceedings,” Lagman said “the wife as the innocent spouse, needs a court-decreed alimony and support for the child or children under her custody with corresponding fines and contempt of court for delinquency in providing financial support.”
He also said absolute divorce is not just a women’s issue but also a poor women’s issue.
“Poor women cannot afford the current exorbitant expense for legal separation or annulment of marriage. An absolute divorce is a merciful liberation of the hapless wife from a long-dead marriage,” Lagman said.