Position paper

The Reproductive Health Bill in the Philippines

The Reproductive Health bills, or RH Bill, are Philippine bills aiming to guarantee
universal access to methods and information on birth control and maternal care. While there is
general agreement about its provisions on maternal and child health, there is great debate on its
key proposal that the Philippine government and the private sector will fund and undertake
widespread distribution of family planning devices such as condoms, birth control pills (BCPs)
and IUDs, as the government continues to disseminate information on their use through all health
care centers.. Senate Bill No. 2378 or An Act Providing For a National Policy on Reproductive
Health and Population and Development introduced by Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago.

Statement of the Problem

Although the government passes this bill, the RH bill the fact that they still maintain that
overpopulation because of supposed high birth rates remains a problem. If they are teaching safe
sex and distributing contraceptives, why are abortion cases still supposedly high from unintended
pregnancies?

Statement of Position

Reproductive Health Bill (RH Bill), the government wants this bill to be legal in order to control
our population here in our country.

The issue

* Should we teach sex education to grade V, VI and High School student?

Facts

On issue.) Should we teach sex education to grade V, VI and High School student?

Sex ED should be taught in school but not just abstinence because that is why teens are
having babies because they were never taught how to use protection. On top of that they are getting
STD's because they are being taught abstinence. Now i just graduated in 2009 and still have high
school fresh in my mind, and i had most of my friends with babies and i have no children but i was
on that road as a teen. Actually children think it is ok to have babies. That is where there is a
problem. If Adults would get off their butts and get a clue there would be less babies with babies.
You can teach children abstinence but also give them an alternative. For those who already have
had sex teach them for males how to put on a condom and females to use birth control and to make
the guy put that condom on. That is the safest way to have sex if that is your chose because
abstinence is NOT working

Despite the name, Sex-Ed is not about education. It's about moral guidance or
indoctrination depending on the material and your viewpoint. At one extreme is abstinence-only ,
and what I view as the much farther extreme, "Safe Schools Czar" Kevin Jennings is promoting
the virtues of "fisting" to 14 year-olds and handing out "fisting kits." Neither belongs in our public
schools.

This responsibility ultimately belongs to parents, and those individuals and entities with
whom they choose to share it.

Pro-life Philippines Foundation, Inc. is deeply saddened and extremely concerned of the
decision of the Department of Education (DepEd) to integrate in our primary and secondary
educational system a course on sex education.

From what we read, a novel academic campaign featuring videos and sessions encouraging the use
of contraceptives and showing situations involving decision-making over committing sexual
intercourse is being pilot tested in less than 30 public schools nationwide among students as young
as 11.

In fairness to DepEd, we acknowledge their effort to implement a measure to stop the spread of
STIs and STDs and to lower down teen pregnancy rates in the country. We also appreciate the fact
that in the said campaign, abstinence and delaying sexual intercourse are well-stressed. But then
again, the rest of their efforts need careful scrutiny and adamant criticism.

Sex education doesn’t belong in schools to begin with. It makes sex and sexuality, which are by
their very nature private and intimate, public and open. All education is an activity which is
essentially public, but because matters of sex are private and intimate (and pertain fundamentally
to the family), the teaching of sex cannot be accomplished in the classroom without violating that
privacy and intimacy.

Add up to that, implementing sex education could actually send the wrong signals to our children.
A clear example would be the instruction on contraceptives. If we teach children to use condoms,
we tell them in effect that it is all right to have sex thus they gain a false assurance in a situation
where they themselves should not be trying out at an early age.