essay about legalization of divorce in the philippines brainly

Essay on Legalization Of Divorce In The Philippines

Students are often asked to write an essay on Legalization Of Divorce In The Philippines in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Legalization Of Divorce In The Philippines

Understanding divorce.

Divorce means legally ending a marriage. In most countries, people can divorce if their marriage isn’t working. The Philippines is one of the few places without a divorce law. Married couples there can’t easily separate, even if they want to.

The Current Situation

In the Philippines, couples can get an annulment or a legal separation instead of a divorce. An annulment is when the court says a marriage never really existed. Legal separation lets couples live apart without ending the marriage.

Arguments for Legalization

Some people say divorce should be legal in the Philippines. They believe it can help those stuck in unhappy or unsafe marriages. It’s about giving people the freedom to choose what’s best for them.

Opposition to Divorce

Others argue against divorce, worried it might harm family values. They fear it might make ending marriages too easy. The Catholic Church, very influential in the Philippines, also opposes divorce.

Whether or not to legalize divorce in the Philippines is a big debate. It’s about balancing personal freedom with traditional values. The decision will affect the lives of many Filipinos.

250 Words Essay on Legalization Of Divorce In The Philippines

Divorce is when two people who are married decide they want to end their marriage. They go to court, and if the court agrees, they are no longer husband and wife. Many countries allow divorce, but in the Philippines, it is not allowed except for Muslim Filipinos who have their own laws.

Why Some People Want Divorce Legalized

Some people in the Philippines want to change the law to allow divorce. They believe that if two people are very unhappy together, it’s better for them to separate and live happier lives apart. They also think that if someone is in a harmful marriage, they should be able to leave for their safety.

Arguments Against Divorce

Other people think divorce should not be allowed. They feel that marriage is very important and should last forever. They worry that allowing divorce could lead to more families breaking up and could hurt children who need both parents.

What Could Happen If Divorce Is Allowed

If the Philippines decides to allow divorce, it would mean that people who want to end their marriage could do so legally. The government would have to create new laws to explain how divorce would work and to make sure that children and both partners are treated fairly.

In conclusion, the idea of allowing divorce in the Philippines is a big topic with strong opinions on both sides. It’s important for people to talk about it and think carefully about what is best for families and for the country.

500 Words Essay on Legalization Of Divorce In The Philippines

Introduction to divorce in the philippines.

In the Philippines, the topic of divorce is a big deal. Right now, the country does not allow divorce, which means that if two people get married, they cannot legally end their marriage through divorce. This is different from many other countries where divorce is allowed and is a common way to end a marriage that is not working anymore.

What is Divorce?

Divorce is when a husband and wife decide to end their marriage through legal means. It is a way for people to stop being married when they feel that they cannot be together anymore. In places where divorce is allowed, it is a process that the court handles to make sure everything is fair, especially when it comes to taking care of children and sharing property.

Arguments for Legalizing Divorce

Some people in the Philippines want to change the law to allow divorce. They say it is important because sometimes marriages can be really unhappy or even harmful. For example, if one person is being mean or hurting the other, it might be better for them to separate. Allowing divorce could help people leave bad situations and start fresh.

Another reason is that people change over time. What if they find out they are not a good match anymore? Divorce could give them a chance to find happiness with someone else. Also, for those who are separated but not legally divorced, it can be hard to move on with their lives, like getting remarried or even just being able to make big decisions on their own.

Arguments Against Legalizing Divorce

On the other side, some people in the Philippines do not want divorce to be legal. They worry that it might break families apart and could be bad for children. They believe marriage is a promise that should last forever, and facing tough times is part of it. They also think that the current laws, like annulment, which is a way to say the marriage was not valid from the start, are enough to handle situations where a marriage needs to end.

Right now, the Philippines offers annulment and legal separation. Annulment is a long and costly process that says the marriage was never right from the beginning. Legal separation allows couples to live apart and divide their property, but they are still married in the eyes of the law. This means they cannot remarry.

The legalization of divorce in the Philippines is a topic that gets people talking. It has supporters who believe it can help people in bad marriages and opponents who worry about its effects on families. As of now, there is no divorce in the Philippines, but the conversation about it continues. It’s important to think about what is best for people’s happiness and safety when discussing this topic. Whether or not the law will change is something that only time will tell.

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Should divorce be legalized in the Philippines?

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Divorce Is Prohibited In The Philippines, But Moves Are Underway To Legalize It

Michael Sullivan

Anti-divorce protesters marched in Manila in February. The Philippine House of Representatives passed a bill in March that would legalize divorce. Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Anti-divorce protesters marched in Manila in February. The Philippine House of Representatives passed a bill in March that would legalize divorce.

After 10 years of marriage to a husband she says was a philanderer, and dealing with her suffocating in-laws, Alpa Go, a mom in Metro Manila, threw in the towel. She wanted out, for herself and her two children.

"I just wanted to cut ties with him," she said speaking in Tagalog. "If I ever achieve my goals, I don't want to do it carrying his name. And if I acquire properties in the future, I don't want to have to share with him. What if I'm gone?" she asks — meaning what if she's dead. "Then he would benefit instead of the kids."

What Alpa Go wants — but can't get — is a divorce. The Philippines, where roughly 80 percent of the population is Roman Catholic, is one of only two countries in the world where divorce remains illegal (with exemptions for the roughly 5 percent of the population that's Muslim). The only other country where divorce remains illegal is Vatican City.

With divorce out of the question, Go did the next-best thing. She filed for an annulment. But they're expensive and out of reach for many Filipinos, whose jobs bring them only a few dollars a day.

Go was lucky in the sense that she'd saved enough money to try. She paid the equivalent of $5,000 to file. It didn't work.

"I filed on the grounds of psychological incapacity," she explains, one of the official grounds for annulment. "But [the court] said it wasn't enough."

Later, she says, her friends told her the judge in Metro Manila's Antipolo municipality, where she filed, wasn't a fan of annulments. So Go gave up.

Laywer Clara Padilla, the executive director of EnGendeRights , a Manila-based nonprofit that advocates for women's rights, says Alpa Go's story is far from unusual. She has heard far worse.

"Women, even if they're in an abusive relationship where their husbands would batter them, even if their husbands are drunkards or are alcoholic or engage in extramarital affairs, even if they do drugs — their wives are unable to dissolve the marriages," she says.

But a bill passed in March by the Philippines House of Representatives is giving hope to proponents of divorce. It would allow divorce for a variety of reasons, including irreconcilable differences, abuse, infidelity and abandonment.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte Has A New Adversary — The Church

To become law, the bill needs to be passed by the Senate and approved by the president. But the House bill, which passed by a vote of 134 to 57, is significant since no divorce legislation has ever made it this far in the Philippines, says sociologist Jayeel Cornelio of Manila's Ateneo University. He calls the bill "unprecedented," but also logical in a country where a recent survey showed more than half of Filipinos are in favor of allowing divorce "for irreconcilably separated couples."

"The influence of the Catholic Church, when it comes to political matters and private moral affairs, is becoming weaker and weaker in the country," Cornelio says. "The resistance of the Catholic Church to the divorce bill is increasingly seen as not in the interests of the public but only the interests of the Catholic Church."

Cornelio says a divorce bill is a sensible, and even "inevitable" next step after the passage of the country's reproductive health law in 2013, which allowed poorer Filipinos in particular access to birth control. Many municipalities have been slow in implementing the reproductive health law, which took more than a decade to pass — evidence of how much power the Church still enjoys.

Still, there is an unusual level of bipartisan support for the divorce bill — a matter of concern for the Catholic Church.

"Yes, it is worrisome for us," says Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Manila. "According to our Philippine constitution, now we are supposed to be pro-family to protect the family, and strengthen the family, and divorce will not help our people at all."

Pabillo acknowledges that there are cases where women who are emotionally or physically abused by their husbands need to get out. But in those cases, he says, "She can legally be separated from the man, so we also [offer] a way out."

It's not a way that allows them a divorce to start life anew in the eyes of the government or the Church. But Pabillo is firm.

"We cannot make a policy for certain cases when the whole society would suffer in the long run," he insists.

Nonsense, says Padilla. She says the Philippines remains "pretty much behind the rest of the world" — in the "dark ages," even, she says — when it comes to issues like divorce and LGBT rights.

"The Philippines should be a secular state where there should be separation of church and state," Padilla says, "where the Catholic Church should not be able to influence their religious beliefs in the passage of laws."

The Philippine Supreme Court recently ruled that Filipinos married to foreigners can get divorced abroad and be recognized as such at home.

Even though the divorce bill had strong support in the House, in the Senate, resistance is much stronger.

"Unfortunately for those who are proposing it, I don't believe in it," says Senate majority leader Vicente Sotto III . "As far as I'm concerned, it's not a priority," he says, though he admits he's taking heat from his four daughters — all of whom, he says, support the right to divorce and want him to consider the bill.

Sotto's own opposition, he says, won't keep him from allowing a vote in the Senate. "We'll discuss it," he says. "I am not going to stymie the bill because I'm not in favor of divorce, that does not mean I'll not do my job. If a senator comes to me and says, 'please, have it in the agenda because we want it discussed,' after discussing in committee, so be it. We'll do it."

A Senate version of the bill could come up for consideration in the next few months, and both Sotto and Pabillo put the chances of passage at about 50-50. Even if the Senate does pass it, the bill would still need to be approved by President Duterte, whose own marriage was annulled.

Duterte has expressed his opposition to divorce in the past. But he's also been a fierce and foulmouthed critic of the Catholic Church, when it comes to the Church's condemnation of his war on drugs, which human rights groups say has claimed more than 12,000 lives since it began nearly two years ago.

If enough Filipinos make a public show of supporting a divorce bill, the populist Duterte might go along. Giving the people what they want while giving the Church a black eye, some observers suggest, might be a twofer Duterte simply cannot resist.

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No to the legalization of divorce

WE, Grade 11 students, recently learned that there has been a motion to legalize divorce in the Philippines. Divorce is already legalized in every single country around the world, except in the Vatican City and our own Philippines (The Economist, 2020). For this reason, it seems to many that it is only right that we follow suit.

At the moment, the only legal process similar to divorce in the Philippines is the declaration of nullity, which establishes a marriage as invalid from the beginning. In order to be considered void from the beginning, a marriage must fall under one of the following criteria: “absence of the essential requisites of marriage – consent and legal capacity of the parties, bigamous marriages, incestuous marriages, or psychological incapacity,” according to Calleja Law (n.d.).

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University of the Philippines-Diliman Prof. Jose Bagulaya Position Paper on the Divorce Law

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Josef Voyer Rivera

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Repeated family transitions raise the likelihood of adverse child outcomes, and parental separation and divorce can transform the family structure from a two-parent biological family to a lone parent or stepfamily status. Although divorce is permissible in Islam, it lays great emphasis on its being a concession and measure that must be resorted to only when there is no alternative. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study is to describe the experiences of Muslim Families in Southern Philippines in Islamic Divorce. In this study, divorce practices were explained in detail to acquire a comprehensive understanding of how the Islamic law of divorce functions. This also describes how the couple arrived at their decision of having divorce. Results revealed that introspection and contemplation, consultation with family members, decision to divorce, Iddah, and processing the divorce were the divorce practices. Determination, avoidance and redirection, settling issues with children, and counting on support mechanisms were the coping mechanisms. Divorce should be avoided, divorce requires careful and thorough deliberation, collateral damage is on the child and there is life after divorce were the insights learned.

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This study explores the political power of the Catholic Church as an institution, examining how the Catholic Church shifts the status of divorce legislation in the Philippines through various strategies through the examination of various pastoral statements, legislative bills, and key informant interviews of crucial political actors. Findings from the Archival Research indicate that the Catholic Church has fragmented influence in the legislature. While the Catholic Church can influence the Senate effectively through its pastoral statements and as a moral stakeholder, influence is lacking in the House of Representatives. Due to this fragmented influence, the Catholic Church resorts to indirect influence — discourses – with the most effective discourse identified as “Discourse as a Violation of Philippine Laws.” The most prominent strategy used by the Catholic Church in the Varieties of Public Religion (Buckley, 2014) is comprehensive mobilization. Key informant interviews indicated strategies utilized by the Catholic Church not strictly fit to the Varieties of Public Religion (Buckley, 2014). The Catholic Church influences the public’s attitude by taking up the role of a moral teacher and protector of the people and attacking concepts of divorce. In influencing policymakers, relationships and embedded Catholic virtues are utilized. Interestingly, there is a lack of concentrated campaigns to address the issue of divorce. This may indicate the Catholic Church’s perception of divorce — which is an issue that can be set aside or ignored. This study recommends that further studies on Church-State relations regarding divorce should be conducted more locally, utilizing a quantitative research design and the agenda-setting framework. Practically, this study recommends a better relationship among divorce stakeholders to facilitate pro- divorce-led discourse.

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In the Filipino culture, marriage is regarded as a sacred matrimony and the family founded on marriage is considered as a reservoir of love, security and care. But reality shows that there are many unhappy and even abusive marriages across all Filipino classes. In fact, violence against women has been one of the pressing issue in the country and in 2003, 53.6% of the total cases of violence against women are reported incidence of wife battering and physical abuses where about three out of ten perpetrators are he husbands of the victims (PNP, 2003). But due to cultural prescription and lack of access to courts to end such abusive marriage, Filipino couples, especially from the marginalized sector, end up either separating without proper legal procedures or bear the strain of the breakdown of their failing marriage. Drawing up on research, this paper seeks to illustrate the factors that trap Filipino wives in an abusive and failing marriage. This paper analyzes the sheer volume of literature that explains the security and primacy of marriage as an institution and the context of how different structures of the Philippine society affect the decision of a wife to stay inside her marriage and bear the sufferings of her relationship amidst abuses and unhappiness.

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