Filipino voters who have yet to make up their minds about their choice for their next president are being advised: look at each aspirant’s stance on reproductive health to help them gauge the candidate’s leadership mettle and political guts.

A candidate’s position on issues like reproductive health, which has a long history of opposition from the Catholic Church in this mainly Catholic country, reveals clues regarding his or her capacity for governance, says Ramon San Pascual, head of the Philippine Legislative Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD).

With assured backing from India's main opposition groups, the ruling Congress party hopes to see voted through in the upper house of Parliament Monday a bill reserving 33 percent of seats in national and provincial legislatures for women.

"The timing is right just now,’’ says Ranjana Kumari, a prominent proponent of the bill and president of Women Power Connect, an influential lobby of some 700 women's organisations and individuals that trains women with support from the United Nations Development Programme’s Democracy Fund.

"The quota was very important in the previous elections because we live in a male-dominated society and the quota was necessary to give women a chance to have a political role," al-Douri told The Associated Press at the offices of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the Shiite slum of Sadr City, where the prayers were held last week.

"But in the future this quota should be removed and women should compete equally with men, because women politicians have proven their competence and reliability in politics," said al-Douri, who is running for a second term on the slate of al-Sadr's party.

After long days of intense canvassing; of lobbying ministers and neglecting her family and children, Boygah thought she would be nominated for the post of chairperson of the Pamplemousses/Rivière du Rempart District Council, in northern Mauritius. "Unfortunately, when the time came the party preferred a man. I was really hurt," she recalled.