Palace says no withdrawal of RH support despite exclusion from priority bills

President Aquino’s decision to drop the Responsible Parenthood (RP) bill from his list of priority legislative agenda for the first Legislative Executive Development Advisory Council (Ledac) he would convene is not an act of betrayal to the women’s groups, Malacañang implied yesterday.

Addressing the disappointed women’s groups, deputy presidential spokesman Abigail Valte clarified that Aquino is not backtracking from his position on his five-pronged RP bill but that he has merely postponed its endorsement pending the conclusions of the State’s ongoing dialogs with Church leaders.

Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines (DSWP) has decried Aquino’s perceived preferential treatment to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) since it is the only sector being consulted on the controversial Reproductive Health (RH) bill while the women’s groups were apparently being marginalized by his government.

DSWP claimed that it has requested an audience with the members of the Aquino administration to address its concerns over RH issues but Valte said she would have to confirm first if indeed a request was sent to the Office of the President.

“We’d like to clarify that the position of the President remains the same. He is staunchly behind responsible parenthood — that has not changed. However, we have explained in the past few days what actually happened. We have committed to the dialog with the CBCP and the last dialog is due

to take place sometime in the last week of February. You all know that the Ledac meeting has been set Feb. 28,” Valte told reporters, reiterating Malacañang’s previous explanation.

“Again, there is that misconception that the President was pushing the RH bill entirely in the campaign. We have always been very consistent that his stand was always for responsible parenthood — meaning that the choice is left to the parents after they have all the available information given to them and that they will make the choice according to their personal belief. And secondly, that we do not favor any method over the other,” Valte added.

A total of 17 draft proposals will be presented by Malacañang come the Ledac meeting and apart from the RP/RH bill, the Whistleblowers Act and the Freedom of Information (FoI) bill were also excluded from the list.

Aquino, in a chance interview the other day, explained that such measures were removed because they can no longer accommodate them owing to the other bills that they would have to prioritize out of the original set of 180 measures proposed by his Cabinet secretaries.

In the absence of the FoI bill, Aquino clarified: “We have been trying to be transparent to the utmost level possible. But, of course, there are times that when, especially in a raw state, we cannot discuss (information) lest we might have apprehensions raised that are not necessary… The shortcut answer is we’re still fine-tuning exactly how it will be, the details, of this Freedom of Information Bill.”

Insofar as the Whistleblowers Act is concerned, presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda earlier said there is already a proposal to that effect that is currently pending at the House of Representatives and they will just push it along with their draft bill seeking the amendment of the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA). –Aytch S. de la Cruz, Daily Tribune