Cost cutting

WHILE every life is a cause for celebration, taking care of the next generation by keeping tabs on the population is a daunting challenge. Stabilizing the population — to not outstrip economic growth and the country’s resources — is a more challenging task.
Environmental stress, biodiversity loss, climate change and pressure on natural resources signal that the Philippines is already overpopulated. But the numbers are still exploding.
The Philippine population hit 102.4 million by the end of 2015. This year, it is expected to increase to 104 million as 1.5 million babies are expected to be born. Based on the data gathered by the Commission on Population (PopCom), in five to 10 years, the country will probably have the “biggest number of women of reproductive age that we will ever see, at 25 to 30 million.”
With these alarming numbers, a hard look on the country’s population control policies is the best option. The government needs to vigorously implement its population policy, which are responsible parenthood and the advocacy for natural family planning.
Health Secretary Janette Garin stressed the need to provide young and poor couples with family planning services to allow them to make better choices and to give their children a better future. She took note of the Philippines’ very young population, wherein women as young as 14 years old are getting pregnant. However, this option was made unavailable after the Senate struck off the P1 billion allotted for family planning commodities for 2016 from the national budget.
Garin said the Department of Health (DOH) originally earmarked P1 billion out of its proposed budget of P124 billion from the P3 trillion national budget for this year to cover the free provision of condoms, IUDs, birth control pills particularly for breastfeeding mothers, in health centers.
Following the budget cut, Garin said that the department will have to exhaust its resources to provide for 6.7 percent of the country’s population with “unmet” family planning services. She added that to be able to sustain its health program for the rest of the year, the DOH would now need to be aggressive in tapping its international partners like the United Nations Population Fund and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Sen. Loren Legarda justified the budget cut saying that the P1 billion will be used for increases in other agencies, “including for DND air assets upgrading, which is timely and equally important given the West Philippine Sea issue.” A part of the P1 billion, according to Legarda, will be redirected to the increase of budget for state colleges and universities.
Senators Pia Cayetano, author of the Reproductive Health law in the Senate, and Miriam Defensor-Santiago both were shocked by the budget cut.
“This abandonment is immoral in a country where some 200 out of 100,000 women who give birth die. The enemies of reproductive health never sleep. We, too, must not rest in fighting for women’s health,” Santiago said.
Perhaps it is best to remind the people who allot budget appropriations that a ballooning population interlinks a myriad of issues and its control simply equates a matter of survival of the human race. While the causes of hunger, scarcity, disease, poverty, war do not rest on the number of this planet’s inhabitants alone, controlling the population renders a chance for a better future.
It may be too late for this year, but in 2017, in preparing the country’s national budget, may the government also appropriate prudence and discover why managing population is an essential formula to achieve poverty alleviation, disease eradication, and even safeguarding the economy and national security. (AJPress)