SOCIO-ECONOMIC Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia has stressed the need to address population growth in boosting the country’s economy through the full implementation of the Reproductive Health (RH) law amid “nonsensical” opposition from conservatives.
Speaking in Thursday’s “Prospects for the New Presidential Administration of the Philippines” conference of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines in Manila, Pernia presented the Philippine job situation.
Poverty, inequality
“The biggest problem, challenge of the country is really poverty and inequality…poverty and inequality is really synonymous with unemployment and underemployment because, without jobs, it’s very hard to solve poverty and inequality and this is what we should be aiming for in this administration,” he said, adding that the two sides of the labor market—demand and supply—must be addressed.
He cited population control as part of investing in human capital in the labor supply side.
He observed that a third of pregnancies every year were “unintended, unwanted or unplanned.”
“Since the late ’70s our family planning program (has been) scuttled by conservative sectors of society including the Catholic Church. And this time, we are not going to listen to any sermonizing from family planning being abortifacient and it kills children, and all that. That’s all nonsense because if we had done that, then we would have been in the same league as our Asean neighbors,” he said.
Pregnant before 20
Pernia also pointed out that out of 10 million girls between 15 and 19 years old, about one million or 10 percent were already pregnant before they reached the age of 20.
Pernia stressed that Mr. Duterte wanted the full and speedy implementation of the Reproductive Health law, adding that the Supreme Court should quickly lift “nonsensical” temporary restraining orders “so we can get started in implementing the law more fully.”