Noy urged to endorse RH bill

MANILA, Philippines - House Minority Leader Edcel Lagman urged President Aquino yesterday to endorse the Reproductive Health Bill, which he authored.

He said the President should complement his advocacy of voluntary family planning, birth spacing and use of contraceptives by immediately endorsing the RH bill, which the previous Congress failed to approve.

“This endorsement would fittingly cap the Aquino administration’s first 100 days and mitigate early setbacks,” he said.

He said the bill guarantees “the right to make free and informed decisions” on how to plan one’s family, and promotes “without bias all modern natural and artificial methods of family planning that are medically safe, legal and effective.”

Lagman pointed out that the Philippines “is the only middle-income Asian country without a comprehensive reproductive health law.”

“The need to institutionalize by legislation a progressive reproductive health policy is imperative to counteract the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of changing administrations and leaders,” he stressed.

He said the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on improving maternal health includes universal access to reproductive health by 2015.

He noted that the Philippines is one of 189 signatory countries to the Millennium Declaration made 10 years ago this month.

The opposition leader said family planning and reproductive health are interlinked with the other MDGs, particularly with reducing extreme hunger and poverty and reducing child mortality as well as with achieving universal primary education and ensuring environmental sustainability.

He said when the first RH bill was filed in the 11th Congress 10 years ago, the Philippine population was about 75 million.

A decade later, on July 1, 2010, when the measure was re-filed, the population “has ballooned to 93.4 million, or a staggering increase of 19.3 million – an average of almost two million annually,” he said.

Citing the human development report of the UN Development Program in 2009, Lagman said that while the Philippines is the 12 most populous country in the world, its human development index has slipped to 105 among 182 countries.

“A high population growth of 2.04 percent impacts adversely on all indicators of human development like health, education, food security, mass housing, and the environment,” he emphasized. – With Marvin Sy, Evelyn Macairan and AP