• Rep. Edcel C. Lagman
• Office of the Minority Leader
• 19 August 2011
• Mobile No. 09189120137/09166406737

RH AND NATIONAL BUDGET

DESERVE EQUAL PRIORITY

           The Reproductive Health Bill (RHB) and the General Appropriations Bill (GAB) must enjoy equal billing as priority measures because the RHB complements the GAB.

           Minority Leader and Albay Representative Edcel C. Lagman, the principal author of the RHB, made this call as he underscored that “no amount of trillions of appropriations will be adequate if the increase in the national budget is eroded by an inordinate population growth because parents, couples and women are not fully afforded the right to responsibly and freely determine the number and spacing of their children.”

           The priority enactment of the RHB was recently given presidential imprimatur and has been included as one of the additional priority bills of the Legislative Executive Development Advisory Council (LEDAC).

           Lagman, who was the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations during the First Session of the 14^th Congress, said that the complementarities of the RHB and the GAB are clear in the following major instances:

           (1) Quality education will always be hampered by huge backlogs in classrooms, teachers and textbooks as the annual escalation of school enrollment outpaces the budget for education.

           (2) Healthcare expenditures will continue to rise if maternal and infant morbidity and mortality are not reduced because reproductive health information and services are not accessible to the marginalized and disadvantaged sectors.

           Empirical studies conducted by the Guttmacher Institute and Likhaan Center for Women’s Health have consistently shown that effective RH services reduce the prevalence of fatal high-risk pregnancies and result in millions of savings for the government.

           (3) Despite budgetary allocations and incentives for job generation, the problems of unemployment and underemployment will defy solution if the huge number of annual entrants to the manpower pool remains unchecked.

           Worldwide studies also show that excessive population growth bloats the unemployment rate and debases wage rates.

           (4) The appropriation for the protection of the environment and the containment of climate change is rendered deficient as the environment becomes the casualty of population influx and the country’s carrying capacity is impaired by unbridled population growth.

 A 2009 study from the London School of Economics on the interconnectedness of family planning and environmental degradation concluded that “each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO₂ emissions by more than one ton.” By comparison, the use of low-carbon technologies will cost a minimum of $32 to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount.

It determined that family planning is more cost-effective than most low-carbon technologies and recommended that “family planning methods should be a primary tool in the optimum strategy for reducing carbon emissions.”