Senate shelves RH bill until January

MANILA, Philippines—The highly controversial reproductive health bill will have to wait.

The Senate put all pending bills, including the RH measure, on hold to give way to plenary deliberations on the proposed P1.8-trillion national budget for next year.

Sen. Franklin Drilon, finance committee chairman, earlier said the chamber usually did so “by tradition” to ensure the government would not operate under a reenacted budget the following year.

Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile said the RH debates will continue when the sessions resume next January following the traditional Yuletide break.

“There’s no more time. We will tackle that when we come back because there are many questions that would have to be clarified,” he told reporters in Filipino. “We’ll have all the time to discuss the RH bill” by January.

Enrile, who was actively involved during the period of interpellation, made it clear that he was not out to delay the chamber’s final action on Senate Bill No. 2865.

“But on the other hand, even if I am chastised, I would have to be very careful because if there’s any single legislative measure that has come by into this Congress, it is this bill. It has a very long-term effect and you cannot quantify it. You cannot anticipate it,” he said.

Enrile maintained that SB 2865 was a population-control measure in the guise of a bill promoting reproductive health.

Proponents of the bill led by its co-sponsors, Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Pia Cayetano, have denied this, insisting that the measure was intended mainly to provide the public with information on reproductive health.

Enrile said he was willing to debate with the co-sponsors of the bill “for as long as we have to finish all the issues and really go to the very bottom of this.”

“The sponsors have denied that this is for population control, but they’re talking of fertility rate. They’re talking of what is an acceptable fertility rate and what is not an acceptable fertility rate,” he said.

“They’re talking of eradication of poverty through birth control. Why are you reducing the sizes of your families if your purpose is only to help the health of the women of this country?” he added.

Enrile suggested an alternative approach to help alleviate poverty.

“We can do that without condoms, without contraceptives, without anything else,” he said. “We can address poverty by educating the children of the poor so they’ll have the chance to go up in life and then create jobs in this country, open our country to massive foreign investment in order that we can increase the tempo of economic activities and thereby create more jobs, which will respond to the economic and financial needs of the people who are looking for work to better their lives.”

Citing the experiences of other countries that adopted population-control measures, he warned that the RH bill, if passed into law, would “contract the population.”

“You (will) reach a point in time where you will have less workers, less production, less consumption, less taxpayers to support the government. Your pension funds will dwindle. You have to import foreigners to work in your country in order to make your economy (grow),” he said. “We will have no economy to speak of.”