By Alexandria Dennise San Juan
At least one in six teenage pregnancies in the country every year is a repeated pregnancy due to young mothers’ lack of access to family planning services, the Population and Development Commission (PopCom) bared.
(Photo by unfpa.org / MANILA BULLETIN FILE PHOTO)
PopCom Undersecretary Juan Antonio Perez III pointed out that this was due to a Supreme Court (SC) decision to remove a section from the Responsible Parenting and Reproductive Health law that would allow the provision of services to minors as long as they were already parents or had a miscarriage.
In 2014, the SC struck down eight provisions of the law including Section 7 (b) which "provides access to family planning and RH (reproductive health) services to minors who have been pregnant or had a miscarriage without a parental consent."
"Teenage mothers are repeating their pregnancy partly because they have no access to family planning services," Perez explained in a forum in Quezon City on Monday, in line with the celebration of Population Development Week.
In a bid to solve this issue, Perez urged President Rodrigo Duterte and lawmakers to come up with a law that will allow minors who are already pregnant or with children to have access to family planning.
"We would like to address that by the President coming up with an executive order, and/or the Senate and Congress coming up with a law, that recognizes the situation and calls for a combination of approach particularly to allow minors who are already pregnant or with children to have access to family planning as it was before," he added.
200,000 teens giving birth every year
Citing a 2013 study by the University of the Philippines, Perez said that one-third of adolescents in the country aged 15 to 19 are engaging in pre-marital sex and 14 percent of them were pregnant or have children.
According to Perez, at least 200,000 adolescents aged 10 to 19 are giving birth every year, with the highest incidence recorded in 2014 when some 576 girls gave birth per day.
"Today, it is just slightly lower at 528 (per day). Cumulatively, 1.2 million minors gave birth from 2010 to 2017," he said.
Teenage pregnancy, a national emergency
In August, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia said the issue of teenage pregnancies in the country is now a "national social emergency" as teenage birth rates rapidly increased over the past decade.
This was echoed by Perez who noted there are now 1.2 million minor-led families or families with young parents, which means that it is now an "emergency situation" and will affect the country's development.
Perez added that teenage pregnancy is not only a health issue but also a developmental and economic issue as the economic cost for adolescent women alone is staggering.
The PopCom official said that at least P33 billion annual earnings of women in the country are lost due to early childbearing.