Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
The Aquino government has earmarked P7.7 billion for reproductive health programs in the 2012 budget, prompting two senators to suggest that there may no longer be any need for Congress to pass the controversial reproductive health (RH) bill.
The amount is included in the proposed 2012 budget for the Department of Health (DOH), which has lined up a number of projects, such as RH services and planned-parenthood programs.
During the hearings on the DOH budget late Wednesday, Senator Franklin Drilon, the finance committee chairman who was defending the DOH budget on the floor, said the P7.7-billion allocation was “interrelated to the RH bill.”
Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III, an opponent of the controversial RH bill, pounced on this.
Sotto asked Drilon if “even without the passage of the RH bill, Filipino women will not be deprived of any reproductive health services… because of the reproductive health program contained in the budget of the Department of Health.”
Drilon answered that the allocation would benefit only “50 percent of the women belonging to the lowest quintile of our economic strata,” which would translate to around 5.2 million households earning less than P6,000 a month per family.
“It is the lack of funds that would dictate that the services be limited to 50 percent,” he said.
Senator Loren Legarda later joined the exchange, asking that “if the resources are available anyway to fund the RH bill, why would we need to enact a bill?”
“If the resources are (at present) inadequate to serve the whole 100 percent (of the poorest women), why do we need to enact a reproductive health bill if it will be an unfunded law?” she said.
She asked why funding resources are not just concentrated on the DOH budget so that all of “the poorest of the poor Filipino women” can be served.
Drilon declined to answer and gave the floor to Sotto, who said Congress should just give the DOH the additional funds.
“We do not need to enact a bill that will make it into a law,” he said.
Senate Bill No. 2865, the upper chamber’s version of the RH measure, is set for plenary deliberations in January. The Senate opted to concentrate on the passage of the proposed P1.8-trillion national budget for 2012 for the remaining sessions this year.
Included in the proposed RH budget next year is a P300-million allocation for “commodities” under the so-called Maternal Newborn Child Health Nutrition program.
Drilon admitted that the allocation would include “family planning supplies.” Under questioning by Sotto, he said they could include condoms and intrauterine devices, depending on the decision of a particular local government unit, which would receive the funds.
Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile noted that proponents of SB 2865 “want to declare (such contraceptives) by law as essential medicine.”
Sotto also questioned the allocation of P1.7 billion for a vaccination program benefiting senior citizens aged between 60 and 69. He said he would propose during the amendments period that the funding for the vaccination program be undertaken by the Philippine Health Insurance Corp.
The P1.7 billion could then be used for “other important undertakings” such as to fund state colleges and universities, he said.