DepEd called on to thoroughly carry out sexuality education in schools

On Sunday, Albay 1st District Representative Edcel Lagman called on the Department of Education (DepEd) to fully implement the comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in schools, and asked his colleagues to immediately act on measures seeking to prevent teenage pregnancies and prohibit child marriage. 

Photo credit: philstar.com

It is after the Commission on Population (PopCom) present its latest projection that the 1.7 million newborn babies expected this year just went up by another 214,000 which attributes the increase to the lockdowns caused by the pandemic.

PopCom executive director Juan Antonio Perez III told that the new projection of 214,000 more babies being born this year is due to the community quarantine implemented to arrest the spread of COVID-19.

This means that by year’s end, the country’s population would have increased by 1.91 million.

The department and the Congress should both strengthen their efforts to make sure that the unplanned pregnancies among youths are addressed. 

The boom on birth rates also underscores the following: The urgency for the Department of Education to fully start on the ground the implementation of the provision on age and development appropriate reproductive health and sexuality education to pupils and students in both public and private schools eight years after the approval of the RH Law; and Enactment of laws preventing and solving adolescent pregnancy, and prohibiting child marriage wherein numerous bills on these concerns are pending in the House of Representatives,

he said in a statement.

These additional newborns will translate to millions of pesos which the government will have to spend for prenatal and post-partum health care services for mothers and their babies, as well as more appropriations for socio-economic services for the increase in the population,

Lagman stressed. 

He reminded that Republic Act No. 10354 or the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law mandates the government to guarantee universal access to medically-safe, non-abortifacient, effective, legal, affordable, and quality reproductive health care services, methods, devices, (and) supplies.

The RH Law also states that the “provision of ethical and medically safe, legal, accessible, affordable, non-abortifacient, effective and quality reproductive health care services and supplies is essential in the promotion of people’s right to health, especially those of women, the poor, and the marginalized, and shall be incorporated as a component of basic health care,

he added.

Lagman also said that the ballooning birth rate is an indictment of the Duterte administration’s failure to adequately provide family planning services and access to contraceptives during the health emergency.