July 12, 2008 · Posted in: Governance, In the News
Arroyo urged to adopt coherent national population policy
WHEN leaders of various international and local groups gathered to observe World Population Day in Mandaluyong City on Friday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was noticeably absent.
Instead, it was former President Fidel V. Ramos who took center stage as guest of honor, having been given the title “Eminent Person” by the Forum for Family Planning and Development.
In his speech, Ramos said Arroyo’s policy on population has “generally been described as ‘flip-flopping’ perhaps due to unwarranted subservience to the Catholic Church, in particular to its group of powerful bishops.”
Read Ramos’s speech, “Population Growth and the Universal Right to Family Planning“
Arroyo, who has admitted to using pills as a young wife and mother, has overturned the policy of her predecessors, who pushed for both natural and artificial contraceptives.
Under her regime, the Department of Health (DOH) issued Administrative Order No. 125, which recognizes natural family planning as “the only acceptable mode of birth control.”
Arroyo refuses to allow national government agencies to purchase contraceptive materials, leaving the decision to purchase — and to set aside funds — to local government units. Government agencies like the DOH and the Commission on Population (Popcom) now promote only natural methods.
Commented Ramos in his speech: “Under the guise of ‘responsible parenthood,’ mothers’ lives and health, together with those of their babies, are now being put at risk for political expediency and religious narrow-mindedness.”
In 2006, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman and then Alagad party-list Rep. Rodante Marcoleta were able to squeeze in a provision in the 2007 budget that set aside P180 million for artificial contraceptives.
That provision was not vetoed by Arroyo, and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) also agreed to release the fund last September. But the DOH has yet to release a single centavo for the actual purchase of condoms and pills — after allotting P30 million for expenses in administering the fund — as it has just finished drafting guidelines for its use. The health department has also yet to decide which local government unit should be given a share of the money.
Government critics say that at the core of the non-release of funds is Malacañang’s aversion to being seen as directly buying artificial contraceptives. The Palace, they say, wants local governments themselves to compete for the fund, and buy the materials themselves.
In the past, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had provided the country with its contraceptive requirement. But the USAID phased out that program in 2003, leaving those who had relied on it to scrounge around for funding.
Last year, Rep. Lagman and other reproductive health advocates managed to increase the allocation for contraceptive materials to P2 billion. But with the initial fund still stalled in the bureaucratic maze, it will take some time before portions of the bigger budget find their way to LGUs.
Ramos warns that the disarray caused by the Arroyo government’s confusing population management policy is killing babies and mothers, arguing that many pregnancies are either unintended, mistimed, or even unwanted.
Quoting a 2007 PCIJ report, Ramos said that as many as 1.4 million pregnancies every year could belong to any one of these categories.
The Philippine maternal death rate stands at 162 per 100,000 live births, or 10 mothers dying per day, while 225 children die daily because of poverty-related diseases.
In its midterm report on the Millennium Development Goals last year, the Arroyo government admitted that the country is far from meeting its target on maternal and child health. Reproductive health groups blame this on Arroyo’s refusal to issue any policy that may antagonize the Catholic Church and thereby further weaken her already tenuous hold on power.
Recently, though, Lagman, a member of the Philippine Legislators’ Committee on Population and Development Foundation (PLCPD), secured an agreement with Arroyo and the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) for a dialogue on the proposed Reproductive Health and Population Management bill.
In a statement, the PLCPD said that the church and the national government needed to “to look beyond the usual debate on population and contraceptives…(and) focus on being not just pro-life, but pro-quality of life, by contributing to the immediate passage of a Reproductive Health and Population Management Policy.”
In the meantime, Ramos took a dig at Arroyo’s much-vaunted economic expertise, and reminded her of her inaugural promise in 2001 to rid the country of poverty in 10 years. “Since she has a doctorate in economics, we can assume she knows the political economy of contraception, both natural and artificial,” he said.
Indeed, University of the Philippines economics professor Ernesto Pernia has warned that “Arroyo’s target of reducing poverty incidence to 17 percent by 2010 (from 30 percent in 2003) is not feasible, if it maintains benign neglect of the population issue.”
In 2000, the National Statistics Office (NSO) placed the population at 76.5 million. This year, the figure stood at 88.57 million.
In a paper entitled “Population as Public Interest,” Pernia said that “rapid population growth does exacerbate poverty.” He clarified, however, that such a quick increase in population numbers alone cannot be blamed on poverty, and that bad governance, high wealth and income inequality and weak economic growth are the main causes.
Nevertheless, Pernia urged the government to adopt a coherent national population policy — backed by an adequately funded family-planning program, which he said is pro-poor, pro-women, pro-children, pro-people, and pro-quality life.
Wrote Peria: “It is time the State arrived at an entente with the Church on the critical need for a sound population policy, as has long happened in other (Catholic) countries.”
10 Responses to Arroyo urged to adopt coherent national population policy
nosi balasi
July 14th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
population growth is unstoppable…”yung mga gay’s nga di naman nanganganak pero dumadami (joke)”…well for me, as a pro life, i prefer a natural method of birth control…and keeping the Church teachings as always in my heart…mahirap…pero masaya…my family is always with me…i know i will never loose them…for being faithful to them…about urging the Govt to adopt a national population policy, well it will not work…even them, the existing people sitting in our Government has no moral values.
jcc
July 14th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
i always find it ironical that people who can afford to raise more children because they are well off have less children but those who cannot, have more children.
responsible parenting is the key to population control. many poor people do not understand the responsiblity of having children. like the parents who raised them before, they do not understand that children must go to school, be provided for by the basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter and health care.
marriage is coded on the primal instinct of sex and procreation, but rich people can afford condoms and pills, but poor people cannot, and even if they can, there is the church that abhors the use of these contraceptives.
the fear of the church is that the unabashed use of contraceptives would lead to promiscuity and immorality. but the uncontrolled population growth of the underprivileged will result to food shortage, shelter shortage, criminalities, famine, disease, ignorance, chaos, societal dysfunction, you name it.
the prospect of having a society of promiscous members can be addressed by educational campaign and rooting in our children the right moral values. every one of us is capable of being promiscous and immoral, but not all of as have become so because some have acted responsibly and have been trained so to act responsibly.
if you take the pills or condom because your budget would not allow to have another baby in the household, that is good parenting, but if you take it so your young girlfriend would not get pregnant then that is promiscuity and immorality. in this latter scenario, there is a failure in the cultivation of moral value, a situation which could be the general situaton in our country, and that makes the church ballistic.
naykika
July 15th, 2008 at 2:16 am
In Ms Arroyo’s Enchanted Kingdom, only the ones who can afford to avail themselves of the Luxury of artificial means of Birth Control can do so, thereby the Poor who can least support having Children more than they can afford must have to do it “naturally” and pray that it will work perfectly and if not, another hungry child going to bed..Enchanted Kingdom indeed…but only for those who have wings…
jcc
July 15th, 2008 at 3:22 am
i do not agree with former President Ramos taking potshots at GMA’s failed governance. he did not have an sterling records of governance either. tumahik na lang po kayo ginoong Fidel Ramos!
nosi balasi
July 15th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Birth Control surely means Sex…and sex education must be introduce at all levels gradually and it depends on the crowd we have…sa school pwede but not sa church hehehe…well for me sex engagement was a time of conversations unlike anything I ever had. Meshing two lives that had before been quite independent was an interesting, exciting, sometimes difficult process of discovery. One of the coolest things about it was getting an occasional hint that this woman I had chosen to marry was even deeper and wiser than I realized. When we were discussing children, contraceptives and family planning, My wife put the conversation in perspective with a simple statement. “I think that if you’re ready to get married, you should be ready to have children.” Maybe that should have been obvious to me, but it wasn’t. At least not at first. At the time when we were preparing for marriage, I had finished college. Since she was planning to quit her job and go to work in a hospital clinic , our decisions about having (or not having) children were … um … complicated. Because of this, I assumed that marriage and childbearing were two separate things. And that they needed to stay separate for a while. But the further we dug into the issue, the more I found my assumptions being challenged.(gigil na kase ako)… I also had to acknowledge that they needed to be challenged in order to bring them in line with a biblical worldview. I want to share that thought process here, because I know that many college students wrestle (or soon will) with the same complications and assumptions. Since When are Children Convenient? The first big assumption I had to deal with was my belief that we could — and should — put off having children until it was more convenient to have them. Obviously, convenience means different things to different people: waiting until both partners have finished school; waiting until you’re financially stable (whatever that means); waiting until the wife is “established” in her career. Birth control, of course, is the major reason these options are available to us. And easy access to birth control often means we take our options for granted. We shouldn’t, because doing so can easily lead to a warped attitude toward both sexuality and children. What I mean is, we live in a culture that believes that men and women alike can have sex whenever, wherever and with whomever, as long as it’s consensual. This so-called freedom is possible because the combination of birth control and abortion supposedly allows us to avoid or get rid of any unwanted consequences. Among those consequences is pregnancy. So, for the single person at least, contraception provides for a lifestyle that is promiscuous and sees children as mistakes to be avoided. I’m not saying that using contraceptives makes you promiscuous, or that all contraceptive users devalue children or condone abortion. I’m just saying that birth control makes it easier to adopt these attitudes. Now, take this train of thought one stop further. If, pre-marriage, we are accustomed to viewing children as “mistakes,” how does this affect our attitude toward them after we are married? For some couples it’s a non-issue. They enter marriage with children in mind, and they view the beginning of the parenting season of life as something to look forward to. On the other hand, I know an increasing number of married couples who have their educational, recreational, financial and professional lives so carefully planned that children are still viewed as mistakes. Unless Junior shows up precisely on his parents’ schedule, he is an interruption to their lives. You simply cannot hold a thorough Christian worldview and view children in that light. The Bible makes clear that having, raising and discipling children is to be a priority for most Christians. It also lets us know that we are not to hold so tightly to our own freedom and our own plans that we leave no room for God’s. Wisdom or Selfishness? I’m not saying that delaying or planning the timing of children is necessarily sinful. But we need to make a distinction between selfish delays and wise delays. And we need to be brutally honest with ourselves about which is which. A wise delay is one that plans for the future with children — and their highest good — in mind. I think it’s entirely possible for Christians, in good conscience, to put off childbearing while they fast-track through school, in order that one parent might earn enough to allow the other parent to stay home after children arrive. Conversely, selfishness creeps in when we continually raise the bar for what constitutes financial stability. If we’re really honest about our priorities, it’s hard to justify a luxury car or a time-share on the beach as achievements to be reached before having kids. A final thought on the delaying-children issue: no matter what our plans are, we need to discipline our minds so that if our preferred method of delaying the arrival of children fails (and they all do most at times!), we are ready to welcome children in God’s timing, even if that’s not our timing…take note with the same wife or husband of course. BUT the real issue here should not be the population control…as one of the paragraph of this post…”In the meantime, Ramos took a dig at Arroyo’s much-vaunted economic expertise, and reminded her of her inaugural promise in 2001 to rid the country of poverty in 10 years. “Since she has a doctorate in economics, we can assume she knows the political economy of contraception, both natural and artificial,” he said.”…this is the issue…i agree to PCIJ’s blog guru, that Ramos has no sterling of governance during his time… and even make profits on his privatization programs…but Ramos is politically correct on his statement about Arroyo’s economic expertise.
kainis
July 18th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
ako masasabi ko lang yung about sa family planning…using contraceptive pills condoms..etc…eh hindi naman pumamatay yung mga yun ah..its not abortion dahil wala pang batang nabubuo..tignan nyo naman yung kalagayan ng pilipinas sobrang daming tao na..grabe na ang population natin. kung nagwoworry kau sa mga minor age na gumagamit ng pills for sex edi huwag gawing over the counter ang pills..kelangan with prescription..kung ung iba kayang magcontrol well hindi lahat kagaya nyo…wag nyong iparis ang sarili nyo sa iba dahil hndi tau parepareho…and isa pa yang mga priest and bishop na yan bakit ganyan kau hinahalo nyo ang simabahan sa pulitika.bakit kau nagtethreat?yan ba ang nakalagay sa bible? “he so busy threatening someone with communion maybe god will do the same to him for ignoring the needy people. who is better the rightous judge or the rightous servent?”mayaman ang simbahang katolika bakit hndi na lang kayo magfocus sa pagtulong sa mga squaters area at mga mahihirap na tao at sa mga taong kapit patalim mas madami png matutulungan mas mabbawasan pa ang krimen.
nosi balasi
July 24th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
a friend of mine forwarded this mail to me.
A little boy goes to his dad and asks, “What is politics?”
Dad says, “Well son, let me try to explain it this way: I’m the breadwinner of the family, so let’s call me Capitalism. Your Mom, she’s the administrator of the money, so we’ll call her the Government. We’re here to take care of your needs, so we’ll call you the people. The nanny, we’ll consider her the Working Class. And your baby brother, we’ll call him the Future. Now, think about that and see if that makes sense,”
So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what dad had said. Later that night, he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him. He finds that the baby has severely soiled his diaper. So the little boy goes to his parents’ room and finds his mother sound asleep. Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny’s room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father in bed with the nanny. He gives up and goes back to bed.
The next morning, the little boy says to his father, “Dad, I think I Understand the concept of politics now.” The father says, “Good son, tell me in your own words what you think politics is all about.” The little boy replies, “Well, while Capitalism is screwing the Working Class, the Government is sound asleep, the People are being ignored and the Future is in deep shit.”…well for me this is the reality…if we talk more about Christianity…the more people will be divided…for everyone would say they are more righteous than the other…population policy is just a diversionary strategy of the sleeping govt…to turn the table around…just to change the topics of their misdeeds. Population is not a problem…the issue that must be tackled by the present govt is how to balance their distribution of goods and services which is up to now is in question.
nosi balasi
July 25th, 2008 at 11:27 am
goods and services in question;
1) education
2) shortage of rice
3) oil prices
4) fertilizer fund
5) utilities (electricity & water)
6) transportation
7) wages
8) taxation
9) health & environment
10) communication
11) public safety
12) livelihood
13) health
14) environment
15) justice
16) ang dami talaga
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