by Sundae Aquino originally published on Rappler via Ashoka 

Two weeks ago, lawmakers screened the film Sunshine inside Congress to rally support for a newly refiled Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Bill. Art imitated life, and life demanded policy.

HB 4115, reintroduced by Kabataan and ACT Teachers party-list, aims to address what has been called a national emergency: rising pregnancies among the youngest girls. In 2022 alone, over 56,000 girls aged 10-17 gave birth in the Philippines, with births among those as young as 10-14 years old rising by 35% from the year prior.

The urgency of these numbers finds a human face in Sunshine (spoilers ahead). In Antoinette Jadaone’s film  the story of an Olympic hopeful takes a harrowing turn after a single pregnancy test changes everything. What begins as a coming-of-age sports drama unfolds into a portrait of how society piles shame, silence, and suffering onto the shoulders of girls who are simply trying to grow up.

Sunshine is not just about an unplanned pregnancy. It’s about the quiet violence that young women experience daily and the systems that routinely fail to protect them. It’s also a story we at Roots of Health recognize all too well.

For 16 years, we’ve worked with young people in Palawan who are rarely given the information or resources to make informed decisions about their bodies and futures. For many of them, Sunshine will feel painfully familiar.

One of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes doesn’t even involve the titular character. A child is raped by her uncle. Her mother knows but says nothing. She lets it happen under her roof and encourages it because the rape keeps her fed and housed. The disturbing scene is not uncommon. Too many families would rather protect their name than their daughters. Too many girls grow up learning that their pain is inconvenient, or worse, deserved.

We also see how unevenly accountability is distributed. When Sunshine tells her partner she’s pregnant, he lashes out. His first instinct is not concern, but escape. The partner’s father steps in—not to help Sunshine, but to protect his son. Sunshine is left spiraling—torn between her Olympic dreams and a life she never planned—while he walks away after handing her a measly ₱5,000. The pregnancy becomes her burden. Her secret. Her shame.

What’s most devastating is how alone Sunshine is. How she felt she had no one to turn to. No safety net. No information. No alternatives. And yet, when she makes a desperate choice, society is quick to condemn, not stopping to ask how she ended up there in the first place.

Jadaone forces us to sit with that isolation. In one scene, Sunshine checks herself into a sketchy motel to end the pregnancy on her own. No one holds her hand through it. We witness every step. This is the emotional labor expected of young women every day: to quietly survive what the system won’t prevent.

The film reminds us of the cost of silence. When reproductive health remains taboo, when schools skip over lessons about rights and relationships, when girls grow up without language to name the abuse or the knowledge to avoid harm – when we treat reproductive health as shameful, instead of something every young person deserves to understand and navigate with care – we are setting girls up to fail.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE), mandated under the Reproductive Health Law, is meant to equip students with age-appropriate and scientifically accurate information. Yet its rollout has been patchy. In reality, many schools hesitate. Discomfort, limited budgets, and inadequate teacher training delay implementation. Silence in classrooms leads to silence in crises.

Just recently, the Department of Education announced it would scrap CSE in favor of a new Reproductive Health Education (RHE) policy. The shift followed relentless campaigns by groups like Project Dalisay, which used misinformation and fearmongering to discredit CSE – falsely claiming it encouraged masturbation among children and undermined parents. Whether RHE will still cover essentials like consent, contraception, and abuse reporting remains unclear.

At Roots of Health, we’ve seen the impact of early, honest conversations about reproductive health. Through our programs in schools and communities across Palawan, we help young people of all genders understand their bodies, rights, and relationships. They shouldn’t have to reach breaking point before accessing this knowledge.

Both education and access to reproductive health counseling and contraceptives can help young peole make decisions from a place of strength, not desperation.

No one should feel they need to resort to unsafe options as depicted in Sunshine. But when young people seek care, they are too often met with judgment instead of support. In many clinics and health centers nationwide, girls are often shamed, denied contraceptives, or turned away—even with parental consent. Young women are only offered care after they have already become pregnant, defeating the very purpose of planning pregnancies.

At Roots of Health we work hard to show young people that care can look different. Our clinics in Puerto Princesa and mobile outreach provide confidential, compassionate, and youth-friendly care. I’ve seen girls’ quiet palpable relief after being treated with respect, not suspicion.

Sunshine doesn’t offer easy answers. But it holds a mirror up to a society that too often looks away. In it we see cracks in the system that let girls fall through: in families, in institutions, in culture. But we also see something else: that these girls still dream. That they try. That they are worth fighting for.

We’ll keep showing up for them, every day, until they no longer have to carry it all alone. Until non-judgmental support is the standard.

Sundae Aquino, 23, is a Communications Officer of Roots of Health, a reproductive health NGO in Palawan founded by Ashoka fellow Amina-Evangelista Swanepoel.