Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman on Sunday said the ballooning birth rate in the Philippines due to the lockdown was “an indictment of the Duterte administration’s failure to adequately provide family planning services and access to contraceptives during the health emergency.”
He said the Commission on Population (PopCom) projected that there will be 214,000 more newborn babies attributed to the lockdown caused by the pandemic, which is over the 1.7 million expected this year.
Lagman noted that the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law (Republic Act 10354) mandates the State to guarantee universal access to “medically-safe, non-abortifacient, effective, legal, affordable, and quality reproductive health care services, methods, devices, (and) supplies”.
The RH Law also states that the “provision of ethical and medically safe, legal, accessible, affordable, non-abortifacient, effective and quality reproductive health care services and supplies is essential in the promotion of people’s right to health, especially those of women, the poor, and the marginalized, and shall be incorporated as a component of basic health care.”
“These additional newborns will translate to millions of pesos which the government will have to spend for prenatal and post-partum health care services for mothers and their babies, as well as more appropriations for socio-economic services for the increase in the population,” Lagman said.
Lagman is the principal author of the RH Law.
Other countries where the provision of reproductive health services continues to be available even during the pandemic do not expect any similar spike in pregnancy and birth rates, he lamented.
Source: Latest Politics News Today (Politics.com.ph)
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