EU envoy presses Manila to ratify RH bill

European Union’s top diplomat to Manila has urged the Aquino administration to certify the immediate ratification of the reproductive health bill and to live up to its international pledge to promote maternal health under the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

EU Ambassador Alistair MacDonald said rapid population growth in the Philippines has been draining the country of its economic resources and continues to hamper the nation’s development.

“The Philippine government has committed itself to the MDG and several of these MDGs require that maternal mortality is reduced and that child mortality is reduced and people generally have effective access to reproductive health services. It’s the Philippine government that signed up to that,” MacDonald told the Tribune in an interview.

The MDGs are time-bound, concrete and specific goals that 189 world leaders committed to achieving by 2015 in September 2000. These goals are: 1) end extreme poverty and hunger; 2) achieve universal primary education; 3) promote gender equality and empower women; 4) reduce child mortality; 5) improve maternal health; 6) combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; 7) ensure environmental sustainability; and 8) develop a global partnership for development.

The Philippines continues to lag behind in implementing these goals.

MacDonald lamented that in recent years the Philippine government has not been as active as it should be in making these reproductive health services accessible across the county.

“The absence of such access to reproductive health services in the country, as I said often, is anti- women, anti-children and anti-development and I’m happy as a friend of the Philippines to call attention to that and hope the country will move forward in that area,” he said.

MacDonald acknowledged that reproductive health is a sensitive issue in the Philippines being a Catholic-dominated state. He, however, said the “Philippine nation has to decide” on an effective framework to address the country’s ballooning population.

“There is always an opposition but this is an issue which the Philippine nation has to decide and I believe there is separation of church and state as in the Constitution. I very much hope that the Department of Health will be able to carry forward a considerable strengthening of services generally including reproductive health services,” MacDonald said.

House Bill 5043, or “An Act Providing for a National Policy on Reproductive Health, Responsible Parenthood and Population Development,” is currently pending before the House of Representatives. It is being supported by some lawmakers who face staunch opposition from the influential Catholic Church, which views all forms of contraception as abortion and therefore immoral or “sinful.”

The argument of the pro-RH bill camp, meanwhile, is that by not providing the people, particularly the youth, optional means other than the so-called calendar method to help them avoid unwanted pregnancy, the country’s population will continue to grow and a large population will redound to more serious problems of national scale, foremost of which is its effect on the economy.

The legislation requires age-appropriate reproductive health education and the distribution and promotion of the use of contraceptives.

Since 2000, the country’s population has grown over two percent each year, making it one of the highest population growth rates in Southeast Asia.

National census data as of August 2008 showed Philippine population reached 88.57 million from 76.5 million in 2000. –Michaela P. del Callar, Daily Tribune