“The fight for women’s access to healthcare continues and we remain steadfast in pushing for pro-women, pro-poor and pro-health legislation.” – GWP Rep. Luz Ilagan
By MARILOU AGUIRRE-TUBURAN
Davao Today
DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Various groups have raised their concerns following the Supreme Court en banc decision Tuesday suspending the implementation of the Reproductive Health Law (Republic Act 10354) for 120 days.
Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch Asia Director, said that 120 days is “a long time for an interim order” and that “Filipino women and families have waited and suffered long enough.”
With the decision, Adams said “the Supreme Court is putting an untold number of women and girls at unnecessary risk.”
Based on the latest Family Health Survey conducted by the National Statistics Office in 2011, for every 100,000 live births, 221 mothers die during pregnancy and childbirth or shortly after giving birth due to complications. The number has increased compared to the recorded 162 deaths in 2006.
The 2006 Family Planning Survey also noted that six out of 10 birth deliveries or 56.5 percent occurred at home attended mostly by hilots or traditional midwives while three out of 10 or 27.1 percent of birth deliveries occurred in public health facilities.
The SC decision came four days after the Law’s Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR) was signed on March 15.
The IRR provisions, according to the Philippine Commission on Women (PCW), include the formation of community health teams to increase the awareness of health risks among families, wide information campaign on RH rights and services, capacity training of health workers, and reconstruction of hospital and rural health units to ensure quality maternal services.
The PCW, in a statement, also said that it pushed for the inclusion of important provisions during the IRR drafting. It cited the need for health service providers to be trained on gender sensitive handling of clients, for referral facility for adolescents especially for those who experienced gender-based violence, and for the Commission on Human Rights, as Gender and Development Ombud, to investigate on the violations of the law.
However, Gabriela Women’s Party Representative Professor Luz Ilagan said in a statement that the status quo ante order of the High Court only affirms that the “struggle for women’s health continues.”
Ilagan noted that they already presented their reservations on the law, citing its population control framework which only “defeats its publicized intent to provide health services.”
Explaining her vote on the HB 4244 (RH Bill) last December, Ilagan said that “reproductive health must not be a tool for population control and population management.”
She took a strong exception to the bill’s Declaration of Policies, which she said, “commands parents to bring forth only those children that they can raise in a humane way.” She also cited Section 12 which, she said, integrates family planning in anti-poverty programs “without specifying its proper function in anti-poverty.” The Section 13, she added, has tasked the local government units “to promote family planning” and even puts the implementation of the program at the disposal of local population officers.
GWP Representative Emmi De Jesus also defended her vote last year.
She said that “there is no room for a population control agenda” in the Bill because it is “anti-women and anti-poor.” She added that “it wrongly perpetuates the notion that blames a burgeoning population, and specifically women’s wombs, for the rising poverty in the country.”
This year, the Aquino government allots PHP 46.8 billion for health or PHP 1.30 per day for every Filipino.
“The fight for women’s access to healthcare continues and we remain steadfast in pushing for pro-women, pro-poor and pro-health legislation,” Ilagan said.
The SC judges voted 10-5 for the suspension of the RH Law which was enacted by
President Benigno Aquino III in 21 December 2012. The oral arguments were set on June 18. (Marilou Aguirre-Tuburan/davaotoday.com)
