EDITORIAL

Mainstreaming Natural Family Planning
Violates Human Rights Endangers Women and Children’s Lives

The Philippine Legislator’s Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD) expresses its indignation and deep concern over the government’s "Policy and Program Directions on Responsible Parenthood and Natural Family Planning (NFP)," which was unveiled side-by-side with the launching of the Responsible Parenthood Movement during the National Population Congress in Malate, Manila recently.
PLCPD believes that this policy, which seeks to mainstream natural family planning, is unconstitutional, violates our people’s human right to reproductive health care and endangers our women and children’s lives. It is a perverse reversal of government commitments to ensure that the Filipino people are provided with universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family planning methods and related reproductive health services. This includes modern methods of contraception, which is the method preferred by majority of Filipino women, as well as natural family planning.
Universal access to a constellation of methods in family planning utilizing a principle of voluntary choice is founded on the 1987 Philippine Constitution, which guarantees for every human person full respect for human rights (Art. 2, Sec 11). It also commits the State to protect and promote the right to health of the people and to instill health consciousness among them. (Art. 2, Sec 15). It further directs the State to adopt an integrated and comprehensive approach to health development, which shall endeavor to make essential goods, health and other social services available to all the people at affordable cost giving priority to the needs of the underprivileged, sick, elderly, disabled, women, and children (Art. 8, Sec 11). Moreover, the fundamental law of the land gives due cognizance to the particular needs of women for gender equality (Art 2, Sec 14); of the youth to enjoy protection of their physical, moral, spiritual, intellectual and social well-being (Art. 2 sec 13); and of spouses to build a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood (Art. 15, Sec. 14).
It is highly improper, if not downright coercive, of government to abrogate the choice of which family planning method to use from individuals and couples, to which a policy of NFP mainstreaming equates. The government, in effect, reneges on its duty to uphold the principle of voluntary choice in family planning, in violation of commitments it made with the international community through instrumentalities such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Program of Action (POA), the Fourth World Conference on Women Platform for Action, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
NFP mainstreaming is a divisive and deceptive strategy that will exacerbate inefficiencies in health service delivery. This in turn will only serve to widen gaps in people’s access to much needed family planning information and services.
The current emphasis in NFP by the government has resulted in competition and even conflict within the health bureaucracy that impacts adversely on local health service delivery. It has come to our attention that there are areas where improving public health capacities for modern family planning services such as IUD insertion and tubal ligation were deliberately denied because health practitioners invoked their "right to conscience." We also fear that current plans to mobilize barangay health workers for NFP mainstreaming will be used to propagate half-truths on the efficacy of natural family planning methods and spreading distorted and unscientific claims against modern methods, which had been the case with the Department of Health’s joint Family Planning/Fertility Awareness training projects with pro-life groups a few years ago.
The PLCPD calls on the Population Commission, the Department of Health and the Executive Department to do some serious rethinking and junk this biased and oppressive policy, and put in its stead a national policy on reproductive health that will ensure universal access of couples and individuals to a constellation of family planning methods and services under a principle of informed choice. /MPmailto:madyaas_pen@yahoo.com