SPONSORSHIP REMARKS

(Delivered by REP. EDCEL C. LAGMAN, Principal Author of House Bill No. 96, at the public hearing on the RH bills by the Committee on Population and Family Relations on 24 November 2010)

If the oppositors to the RH bills can be true and candid to the public and to themselves, they would admit that they are objecting not because the bills are health measures but because the bills are basically family planning and population measures.

 Verily, the referral of the bills to the Committee on Population and Family Relations is correct and consistent with the jurisdiction of the committee on “all matters directly and principally relating to population growth and family planning” as provided by Section 27 (mm) of the Rules of the House.

 Family planning and population and development are interlinked with reproductive health.

 The RH bills aim to ensure an enabling environment for people to choose freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and the method of family planning best suited to their needs and personal convictions – which are basic human rights. They seek to help women and couples meet their fertility goals and guarantee the reproductive health of all Filipinos.

 Neither the Church nor the State has the right to dictate on the faithful or citizens which form of family planning they should use. That choice primarily and ultimately belongs to the couple, but most especially to women who bear the brunt of pregnancy, childbirth and childcare.

 The central concept of the RH bills is freedom of informed choice. There is neither compulsion or reprisals for non-acceptors nor rewards or incentives for acceptors.

A comprehensive, rights-based, health-oriented and development-driven law on reproductive health and population development will also:

 1.  Improve maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition, and reduce maternal, infant and child mortality, consistent with the Millennium Development Goals whose common denominator is reproductive health and family planning;

2.  Effectuate the people’s right to sustainable human development;

3.  Help lower the incidence of abortion by preventing unplanned, mistimed and unwanted pregnancies – the very pregnancies which are terminated through abortion;

4.  Enhance the success  of the country’s poverty alleviation agenda; and

5.  Enable government to confront the challenges of climate change and environmental despoliation. I am positive that the enactment of a national statute that upholds the right of every woman to safe motherhood; the right of every Filipino to reproductive self-determination; and the right of every child to be born wanted, is nearing its ultimate realization.

 The people have spoken in favor of the RH bills in numerous surveys with consistent results; the leadership of the House is committed to prioritize consideration of the bills and put to a vote a consolidated version; the President is steadfast for responsible parenthood and voluntary contraceptive use; and the Holy Father has moderated the Church’s prior total ban on the use of condoms in favor of their use for health reasons.

I earnestly urge the approval of House Bill 96 together with the five allied bills.