Santiago ‘appalled’ at P1B cut in RH allocations

Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago.
INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / RICHARD A. REYES

Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago said she was “appalled” at the P1 billion cut in the Reproductive Health (RH) allocations in the 2016 budget.

“When I am president, I shall work to fully and conscientiously implement the Reproductive Health Law,” Defensor-Santiago, who is running for president in May, said in a statement on Friday.

“I am therefore appalled at the cut on reproductive health allocations in the 2016 budget. It is irreconcilable that Congress, which enacted the RH Law after much hardship in 2012, would three years later render that same law inutile,” she said.

Defensor-Santiago said the said P1-billion budget cut “threatens to deprive some seven million women of reproductive health services.”

READ: P1B for condoms, pills nixed

“This abandonment is immoral in a country where some 200 out of 100,000 women who give birth die,” she said.

“The enemies of reproductive health never sleep. We, too, must not rest in fighting for women’s health,” the Defensor-Santiago added.

Senator Loren Legarda, chair of the Senate committee on finance, earlier defended the budget cut, explaining that it was realigned to augment the budget of other agencies such for upgrading the air assets of the Department of National Defense’s and to raise the budget of state universities and colleges. RAM

READ: Legarda defends DOH’s P1B budget cut