Case Study: Perinatal Care for a Filipina Immigrant

Abstract

Francesca is a 19-year-old woman with a secondary education who, only a year ago, joined her American husband she met online. After 6 months of online communications, her husband decided to visit Francesca in the Philippines to personally meet her and to ask her parents’ permission to marry her. Francesca comes from a small fishing village in the Philippines. Her father is a fisherman and her mother is a full-time housewife. She has four brothers and three sisters and she is the fifth child in the family. She did not pursue further studies due to the high cost of getting a university degree, like her brothers who also only completed secondary schooling. Her sisters are completing their primary and secondary schooling at a public school, which is 40 min by foot from their home. As the oldest child living with her parents, she helped her father sell fish in the local market. Her four brothers are already married and living in a nearby village.