Philippine President Rodrigo Roa Duterte has issued an order last week directing the appropriate government agencies to provide some six million marginalized Filipino women free contraceptives.
The decision was met with wild opposition and criticisms not just by the dominant Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines but also critics of Duterte who believe that the order is only a temporary and stop-gap measure to address the burgeoning population of the country.
However, it should be noted that Duterte’s executive order implements a landmark legislation signed by his predecessor, Benigno Simeon Aquino III. The Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012, also called the RPRH Act, provides poor women access to reproductive health information and services.
The law, which was fiercely fought by abortion rights advocates, recognizes the right of Filipinos to decide freely and responsibly on their desired number and spacing of children, notes The Sydney Morning Herald.
Aimed at reducing population and poverty
Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia said the intensified drive to make contraceptives available to some six million Filipino women are meant to ensure zero unmet need for family planning in order to help reduce poverty in the country.
Pernia said the government’s target is to cut the poverty rate from 21.6% in 2015 to 14% or 13% by the end of Duterte’s term in 2022.
The executive order Duterte signed on January 23 said out of the six million women with unmet needs for modern family planning, two million have been identified as poor.
The two million women should have access to them by 2018, and all the rest thereafter, the order added, reports Inquirer.net.
Duterte has ordered several government agencies, including the education and health departments, to implement policies and mechanisms designed to meet the requirements of the RPRH Act.
These include a comprehensive gender-sensitive sexuality education in the school curriculum, health insurance benefit packages for women and on-the-ground education campaigns.
Addressing increasing teen pregnancies
The executive order also directs government agencies to locate couples with unmet family planning needs, mobilize agencies up to the village level and partner with civil society in intensifying the drive.
The Philippines is the only Asia-Pacific country where the rate of teen pregnancies rose over the last two decades, the U.N. Population Fund said last year.
It said the slow decline of the country’s overall fertility rate may deprive the Philippines of faster economic growth expected in similar countries that have more working-age people than younger and older dependents.
In 2015, the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order on certain provisions of a landmark Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law following appeals by anti-abortion groups that view contraceptives as causing abortions.
The court prohibited the distribution of a contraceptive implant and put on hold the renewal of licenses for other contraceptives. The government has appealed for the lifting of the temporary restraining order.
Pernia explained that the Philippine government cannot continue to tolerate the delay in judgment because time is of the essence as far as the implementation of the Reproductive Health law is concerned.
He explained that 11 Filipino women die each day from complications of pregnancy and delivery and the law will reduce maternal deaths and teen pregnancies in addition to enabling families to have the number of children they want.
Juan Antonio Perez, executive director of the Commission on Population, said if the contraceptives are made available to the six million women with unmet family planning needs, the contraceptive prevalence rate can increase to 65%, from the current 40%.
The Philippines’ population, now at 104 million, is growing at a rate of around 1.7% yearly, but the growth may be reduced to 1.4% if the campaign is fully implemented by 2022, Perez pointed out.
The government’s efforts will likely face strong resistance from the Catholic Church. About 80% of the country’s population is Roman Catholic, according to the last census of the National Statistics Office in 2010.
Implementation of the RPRH Act, which sat in Congress for more than a decade before it was enacted, has been bogged down in the courts.
In July 2015, when about 400,000 birth control implants had already been acquired, the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order for distribution of the implants, which can prevent pregnancies for up to three years, and for renewal of licenses for other contraceptives.
The order was issued after anti-abortion groups, believing that contraceptives cause abortions, fought the law in court.
After the law was signed in December 2012, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, which staunchly opposed the bill in Congress, sought to invalidate it in court. But in 2014, the Supreme Court found the controversial law, except for a few sections, to be constitutional.
One section that was declared void would have required private and religious hospitals to refer patients to other facilities that provide contraception and other services.
Others would have punished providers for not distributing reproductive health-related information to patients and allowed minors to receive family planning services without their parents’ consent.