Youth commission: Teen pregnancy rate shows need for reproductive health program

The National Youth Commission (NYC) stresses the need for a reproductive health program over an alarming UN report that pregnancy is most common among young women in the Philippines.

Citing a UN Population Fund (UNFPA) study, NYC said 53 of every 1,000 Filipinas aged 15 to 19 are pregnant. This is the highest pregnancy rate in the region, NYC said.

According to the NYC’s own National Youth Assessment Study, unplanned pregnancy is one of the main reasons teenagers stop going to school.

“Teen pregnancy has many dimensions and its strongest impact is on the young mother whose future will be jeopardized because she needs to take on the responsibilities of being a mother at a very young age,” NYC commissioner Perci Cendaña said.

He added teen pregnancy has become commonplace.

“Most young people would usually have a friend or know a peer who became pregnant at a young age,” he said.

He said a rising pregnancy rate can only be reversed through age-appropriate reproductive health education.

“(This) is key to influencing the lifestyles of young people so that they can be made more responsible of their actions,” he said.

“The need for a national Reproductive Health (RH) policy is so obvious now more than ever,” he said.

He said failure to pass the RH bill, now pending in Congress, is “tantamount to betraying the young of our country.”

On Thursday, retired Archbishop Oscar Cruz warned that the RH bill is “a form of foreign intervention” from international organizations urging the Philippines to put a reproductive health policy in place.

“I perfectly understand the collaboration and possibly even the conspiracy because there is a lot of money behind the RH bill, precisely because the most interested entities here are multinational pharmaceuticals,” he said on a statement on the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines website. –Jonathan de Santos | Yahoo! Southeast Asia Newsroom