Govt is bent on pursuing family planning program

HEALTH Secretary Enrique Ona on Monday said his department would push for the passage of the reproductive health bill, setting the stage for a confrontation between the Aquino administration and the Catholic Church.

Church leaders who oppose all forms of artificial birth control and sex education in schools managed to block its passage in the last Congress, but Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman has re-filed the bill that seeks to establish a national policy on population management.

Ona said that under the bill, the government would explain to the public the importance of “responsible parenthood,” a term favored by President Benigno Aquino III.

Ona said families must be guided so they could decide “with correct and complete information” about the family planning options available to them.

“We will support the legislative agenda of the President that will ensure comprehensive health policies for our people and population policies that prevent abortion and unwanted pregnancies, and which advances the sustainable and equitable growth of our economy,” Ona said.

President Aquino has not made a clear stand on the RH bill since he took office in June, but he tempered his support for it during his campaign for the presidency.

At a forum in January, Aquino said he still wanted Filipinos to be informed of the various methods of family planning so they would be free to choose the method they preferred. But he backed away from supporting a move to make contraceptives available in all government hospitals.

The lack of a clear statement from the Palace has led both supporters and critics of the bill to look to President Aquino for support.

But Yolanda Oliveros, head executive assistant at the Health Department, said there was no change in the policy to support the RH bill.

“This is also the stand of President Aquino. He is for responsible parenthood through an informed choice. We never heard that the President backtracked in his support for this,” Oliveros said.

“When we talk about reproductive health, it does not refer only to family planning,” Oliveros said.

“This is the wrong notion—that reproductive health means only population control.”

Ona, in his first press conference, said the “biggest sin” was to irresponsibly bring a child into world with no means to support him or her.

He said artificial as well as natural methods of family planning should be made available to couples to help them practice responsible parenthood.

“We in the government should be able to present them in a very objective manner and at the same time make sure that they are given all the options, be it natural planning which my church, the Catholic Church, supports aggressively, or… scientific methods,” Ona said.

He said neither he nor the President supported abortion.

In an article posted on the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines Web site last week, the chairman of the group’s Commission on Family and Life said he would seek a dialogue with Ona to register their opposition to the RH bill.

A 2008 study from the UP School of Economics notes that family size is closely associated with poverty, as consistently borne out by household survey data over time.

“Poor families are heavily burdened when they end up with more children than they themselves desire,” said Ernesto Pernia and Stella Alabastro-Quimbo, the authors of the study.

The latest data also show that the incidence of poverty is less than 10 percent for a family with one child, but rises to 57 percent for a family with nine or more children.

Larger families also spend less on each child, and 44 percent of pregnancies among the poorest women are unwanted, the study said. –Manila Standard Today