In legal limbo
Today the nation joins the international community in marking World Population Day with the reproductive health law still stuck in legal limbo. The Supreme Court, headed by a woman, is sitting indefinitely on its temporary restraining order on contraceptives. An executive order issued by President Duterte has failed to achieve its objective, which is the full implementation of Republic Act 10354 or the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act.
The RH program is part of the 10-point socioeconomic agenda outlined by the President at the start of his term. He will be delivering his second State of the Nation Address later this month with RA 10354, enacted way back in 2012 after a decade of debates over the same objections, still not fully implemented.
Filipino women with the financial means and education have always enjoyed access to reproductive health services and have enjoyed the right to choose whether or not to space their pregnancies and use contraceptives. RA 10354 is meant to provide the same access, which is every woman’s right, to the poor. Universal access to RH programs is also one of the UN Millennium Development Goals that the country has committed to pursue. The SC continues to stand in the way of this goal.
The United Nations Development Program established World Population Day in 1989, two years after the Day of Five Billion was observed on July 11, 1987 – the year the global population hit the five-billion mark. The UN has linked population to development issues, poverty and the environment. This year, the UN reports that some 225 million women worldwide who want to avoid pregnancy lack access to RH services, forcing them to resort to unsafe and unreliable family planning methods. Most of these women live in 69 of the poorest countries.
Family planning, according to the UN theme for World Population Day 2017, is critical for people empowerment, gender equality, poverty alleviation and national development. The UN stresses that access to safe, voluntary family planning is a human right. In particular, it is a woman’s right, and it continues to be stifled in this country.
