Three weeks after the Supreme Court rejected pleas to reconsider its ruling upholding the legality of the Reproductive Health Law, four groups have banded together to ask the high court to restore the penal provisions that it earlier struck down.
The groups that filed the appeal were the Filipino Catholic Voices for Reproductive Health (“C4RH”), Inc., Interfaith Partnership for the Promotion of Responsible Parenthood (IPPRP), Emeliza Bayya Mones (former national Council Representative of the UCCP), and Zahria Mapandi (Executive Director of Al-Mujadillah Development Foundation, Inc.).
Section 23, meanwhile, lays down the penalties on RH law offenders.
The groups said allowing healthcare service providers to refuse RH services like ligation due to absence spousal consent “will pave the way for abusive husbands to continue to abuse and control the health and lives of their wives.”
“Between the so-called ‘marital privacy,’ the woman’s right to privacy and right to life and health should prevail,” the groups added.
The groups said it would be “dangerous” to allow health facilities to refuse to refer patients regardless of his or her religious beliefs.
“This could be subject to frivolous objections to deny referrals subjecting patients to human rights violations and shattering the whole principle behind the necessity of the medical profession and the rationale of an effective and responsive public health system,” the groups said.
The groups said it was still a doctor’s “Hippocratic oath to first do no harm.”
Meanwhile, allowing healthcare service providers to refuse adolescent access to contraceptives when there is no parental consent is contrary to the best interest of the child, they said.
“It is discriminatory against adolescents and would be extremely detrimental in the work of adolescent reproductive health providers in preventing unintended pregnancies and in halting HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infections,” the groups said.
The groups said the SC decision to struck down the provisions that would have allowed minors to avail of RH services without parental consent was “a clear violation of minor adolescent girls’ reproductive health rights. It is also detrimental to the work of medical providers in decreasing and halting HIV transmissions.”
They cited a 1976 US Supreme Court ruling (Planned Parenthood v. Danforth) in which the high court declared as unconstitutional the parental consent provision in a Missouri abortion statute.
The penal provisions should be maintained “in light of women’s and adolescent girl’s realities such as violence against women and adolescent girls, reproductive rights violations on women’s and adolescent girls.”
The groups cited a 2008 National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) released by the National Statistics Office showing that the more children a woman has, the more likely she is to have experienced violence.
“This means that not being able to control one’s fertility relates to the power dynamics in the woman’s relationship with her male husband or partner,” they said.
The groups also wanted to restore the penalties for public officials who would refuse to support RH programs. “Such declaration (not punishing public officials) subjects the RH Law to abuse since violators of acts punishable under these provisions would go scot-free.
The groups also claimed that “religious refusal” is against the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women’s (CEDAW) “Findings and Recommendations of Treaty Monitoring Bodies on the Philippines Obligations to Provide Access to Modern Contraceptives.” — RSJ, GMA News
