The pressure is mounting on President Aquino from opposite sides over the Reproductive Health (RH) bill as the United Nations warned yesterday that failure to pass the birth control law could reverse gains in development goals a day after the powerful Catholic Church flexed its muscles through a massive rally against the measure that goes to a vote tomorrow.
The bill seeks to make it mandatory for the government to provide free contraceptives in a country where more than 80 percent of the population is Catholic and which has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Southeast Asia.
Ugochi Daniels, country representative from the UN Population Fund, said she remained “cautiously optimistic” that President Aquino’s allies who dominate the House of Representatives could muster the numbers to pass the bill on Tuesday after 14 years of often divisive debate.
“What is important now is to highlight the urgency of the bill,” Daniels said.
The UN, in a separate statement, said the Philippines was unlikely to achieve its millennium development goal of reducing maternal deaths by three quarters and providing universal access to reproductive health by 2015.
The body said it had “extensively studied” the proposed law which once passed could “vastly improve health and quality of life” in a country where a third of the population live on less than a dollar a day.
A rise in unwanted pregnancies could swell the number of people in poverty, and lead to an explosion in urban slum populations, the UN said.
And while the country has been enjoying economic expansion of more than five percent in recent years, the gains could be reversed, it warned.
“Hopes of future prosperity could turn to dust if the country is not able to deal with the population growth,” the UN said.
Daniels said maternal deaths would continue to rise with more and more women getting pregnant at a young age without the proper health care and access to key reproductive information.
Between 2006 and 2010, the maternal mortality rate rose 36 percent to 221 deaths per 100,000 live births, from 162 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 2005, according to the government’s 2011 Family Health Survey.
And many of those giving birth were girls between 15 and 19 years old, the UN said.
“I think we’ve gone from 11 (maternal deaths) a day to between 14 and 15 a day now. And unfortunately, most of these are poor women,” Daniels said.
The UN Population Fund was “very concerned” about the rising number of deaths, she said, noting that even in war-torn Afghanistan the trend was downwards.
She urged Philippine lawmakers to quickly pass the bill and “stop failing our young.”
“This is now the time. We have been waiting for a very long time,” Daniels said.
The UN’s call came as Catholic priests and nuns led thousands in a protest rally in Manila Saturday to urge lawmakers to scrap the bill.
Besides free contraception, it would also give the poor preferential access to family planning services in state hospitals, while lessons in family planning and sex education would become compulsory in schools and for couples applying for a marriage licence.
The UN has said a lack of education and access to condoms has led to an explosion of HIV infections in the Philippines, which it said is now one of seven countries in the world where cases have risen by 25 percent or more since 2001.
Aquino has signalled his backing of the bill ahead of Tuesday’s vote in the House of Representatives.
The Senate, the upper house of parliament, also needs to pass the bill before it can become law, but some of its leaders were seen giving their support to the church rally Saturday.
Pharmaceutical firms are expected to gain much from the Palace-backed bill which would embark on a P 13.7-billion allocation just for the implementation and an undetermined fraction of the P56.8-billion 2013 budget for the Department of Health for the purchase of contraceptives.
No less than the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines for Life revealed in an article posted in its web portal that the government was bent on allotting significant part of the DoH allocation on the implementation of the RH bill amid official statement from the Malacanang which claimed to have enough numbers to warrants is passage notwithstanding the clamor against it.
CBCP for Life, a portal initiated and maintained by the CBCP Media Office, is a comprehensive resource portal of life and family digital materials from a collaborative work of institutions behind the “online databank” of multimedia resources.
The DoH is expected to have an operating budget pegged at P56.8 billion, which represents a 24 percent hike as compared to their budget for the current year.  The increase, the highest budgetary increase as compared to other government departments, is perceived to be in anticipation of the RH bill passage by the bicameral congress before December this year.
Sec. Butch Abad of the Department of Budget and Management said the increase will help the administration advance its universal health care agenda for all Filipinos, particularly the poor and vulnerable.
The CBCP portal said no less than Sen. Lito Lapid revealed the huge RH bill price tag, which the senator claimed to have learned from one of the pro-RH lobbyists pushing the proposed bill embarking on safe sex and population control.
In its article, Lapid managed to get the figure from Sen. Pia Cayetano, who admitted during interpellations on Senate Bill 2865 that the DoH had asked for P13.7 billion to implement the RH bill for the year 2012 alone – an amount bigger than the individual budgets of the departments of energy, finance, foreign affairs, justice, labor, science, tourism, and trade. The figure also dwarfs the budgets proposed for the Office of the President and Congress, as well as for the entire Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
The revelation of the huge RH budget is the latest in the string of exposes to hound the pro-RH lobby, which had earlier been found to be using outdated data on maternal deaths and abortion. RH proponents had long been saying that the budget would only be P3 billion annually.
The same article reported that Lapid pointed out that even at P3 billion per year, slum dwellers could already be sent back to the provinces and given their own land over a 10-year period.
The act of the DoH officials not mentioning the amount in budget hearings is perceived designed to keep the critical members of both chambers of Congress from details corresponding funds intended for the purchase of the contraceptives which may derail RH bill’s passage.
Earlier, Senate President Juan Ponce-Enrile blasted RH proponents for not being transparent on the real purposes of the bill, even as he suspected that billions of pesos in taxpayers’ money could go only to artificial birth-control purchases.
“This now suggests to me that at the bottom of this bill this is a measure to control the population of the country. Why is DoH not telling us that it is anticipating that it will involve such a huge amount of funding coming from tax money? We have to scrutinize this bill very carefully. This might be a trap for the country.”
Enrile recalled that the Marcos regime did not entirely implement a US-funded population control program, as it was a US foreign-policy dictate. True enough, the declassification in the 1990s of the National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests, written by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974 showed that the Philippines was among 13 countries targeted for depopulation to protect American commercial interests.
“This bill is unfair to the Senate. It does not tell us what it wants to do. Maybe I’m dense or not as intelligent as the sponsors of the bill but my impression is this bill is not candid enough on what is its real purpose,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Vicente “Tito” Sotto III has also echoed Enrile’s finding no reason to spend more on safe sex and population control because provisions for the purpose espoused under the RH bill have long been put up in the communities, even without an RH bill.                                            AFP