Senator backs Aquino’s renewed stand on population bill
MANILA, Philippines—Senator Panfilo Lacson backed President Benigno Aquino III’s renewed push for the controversial Responsible Parenthood bill, saying the President was on the right track to address the country’s perennial problem of poverty.
“Finding ways to curb our monstrous population growth rate, which has been a major part of our poverty problem, is one sensible approach in poverty alleviation. Advocating population management is not being anti-life. In fact, it is pro-country and pro-people,” Lacson said in a statement on Tuesday.
Population management, he said, was urgent since most poor Filipinos do not have enough food or access to basic services.
“There is not enough food on the table, many are homeless, the poor have almost zero opportunity to have access to education, health care and the most basic social services, which they can otherwise enjoy with an efficient but moral population management program,” said the senator.
Lacson then chided some sectors for claiming that the proposed measure was anti-life as he reiterated his firm stand against abortion.
“Any form of abortion should be condemned and punished. That much is clear,” he said.
Lacson himself filed during the 14th Congress Senate Bill 43, which encourages reproductive health and population management, yet rejects abortion and considers it a grave criminal offense.
The bill seeks to create a reproductive health and population management council to implement an integrated policy on reproductive health.
It also contains provisions for timely, complete and accurate information and education on reproductive health, and access to safe, adequate and affordable reproductive health care services – all as a preventive measure against abortion.
Senate Bill 43 likewise promotes a population management program that aims to encourage the limitation of the number of children to an affordable level of two children per family; discourage migration to urban centers and decongesting thickly populated areas; promote effective partnership among the national government, local government units and the private sector on population management; and conduct studies on and provide incentives for the deceleration of population growth.
“Yet it continues to ban abortion, which is a crime under the Revised Penal Code,” the statement added.
