Teen pregnancies a national emergency: Duterte
MANILA: President Rodrigo Duterte issued an executive order declaring “a national and social emergency” over the alarming spike in the number Filipina teenagers and even younger at 10 years old who are geting pregnant and becoming mothers too soon, especially with the lockdowns imposed against the COVID-19 pandemic.
In his order, Duterte cited data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and the Commission on Population and Development (Popcom), which showed that teenage pregnancies have become a major problem in the government’s determined atempt to reduce its galloping annual population growth.
For instance, the PSA disclosed that 183,967 live births were delivered in 2018 by Filipino girls between 10 and 19 years old. It added that in the following year, 2019, live births from the same group stood at 180,916.
Compounding the problem, Duterte said, was Popcom’s warning that more and more teenage mothers would emerge as the country batles the pandemic which continues to wreak havoc on the lives of people and the economy.
“The number of adolescent pregnancies is expected to rise,” Duterte said, “as girls already living in dysfunctional homes spend more time with their households as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and are hereby more exposed to abuse.”
Experts agreed and warned that problem of teenage pregnancies could increase during the pandemic, with barriers to services and increase in sexual and gender-based violence from the community quarantines or lockdowns imposed
More specifically, Popcom reported that two 10-year-old girls were the youngest among the 62,500adolescentswhobecameveryyoungmothers in 2019. It said that one came from Metro Manila and the other from Calabarzon, the two regions with the highest number of teenage pregnancies.
Calabarzon stands for the provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, and Quezon in Southern Luzon, one of the country’s richest and fastest-growing regions for hosting big foreign and local companies in their export processing and similar zones.
Amid this alarming background, Duterte issued Executive Order 141 emphasising that preventing teenage pregnancies is now a national priority as it ordered Popcom and all other concerned government agencies to participate actively and implement measures to achieve such end.
“To this end,” the order read, “the State shall mobiliseexistingcoordinativeandlegalmechanisms related to the prevention of teenage pregnancies and strengthen adolescents’ capacity to make autonomous and informed decisions about their reproductive and sexual health by ensuring access to comprehensive health and rights services.”