Two bills seeking to legalize absolute divorce are pending at the House of Representatives.
Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman authored House Bill No. 116 which, he said, is a means for the “merciful liberation of the hapless wife from a long-dead marriage.”
Lagman, who also fought for the controversial reproductive health bill in his previous terms, said it is a “pro-woman” measure, noting that in marriages it is the woman “who is usually brutalized and it is the man who philanders and gets away with it.”
For activist women’s party list group Gabriela, it is the fifth time since 2005 that it is pushing for the legislation of divorce in the country.
Gabriela was accompanied by other divorce advocates and lobby groups as they filed the bill in Congress Wednesday.
Under Gabriela’s bill, the following conditions must be met before divorce can be granted:
• the petitioner has been separated de facto from his or her spouse for at least five years at the time of the filing of the petition and reconciliation is highly improbable;
• the petitioner has been legally separated from the spouse for at least two years at the time of the filing and reconciliation is highly improbable;
• when any of the grounds for legal separation has caused the irreparable breakdown of the marriage;
• when one or both spouses are psychologically incapable to comply with the essential marital obligations; and
• when the spouses suffer from irreconcilable differences that have caused the irreparable breakdown of marriage.
In the bill of Lagman, the following are considered grounds for absolute divorce:
• psychological incapacity as defined under Article 36 of the Family Code;
• irreconcilable differences or conflicts between the married couple which are beyond redemption, or
• when either of the spouses secures a valid foreign divorce, canonical divorce, and gender reassignment surgery.
The bill likewise adopts as grounds for absolute divorce the grounds for legal separation and annulment of marriage provided for in the Family Code of the Philippines, which include: marital abuse, sexual infidelity, attempt against the life of the other, abandonment, de facto separation, conviction for a crime when the sentence is more than six years, contracting a subsequent bigamous marriage, drug addiction or habitual alcoholism, and lesbianism or homosexuality.
For annulment of marriage, the current grounds are lack of parental consent, vitiated consent, impotency, insanity and affliction of sexually transmissible disease.
Lagman said that 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.”
According to him, the bill gives an 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.
The Philippines is one of only two countries in the world today which has no law on absolute divorce, after voters in Malta recommended by referendum the approval of its own divorce law in 2011. The other country with no divorce law is the Vatican City.
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