THE national government may make a pitch for a new law that will mandate all micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to offer modern family planning resources to their employees, the Commission on Population and Development (Popcom) said on Thursday.
Popcom Undersecretary Juan Antonio A. Perez III told the BusinessMirror the new law will require MSMEs to offer family planning services that are similar to those being given by large corporations, or those employing over 200 workers.
While the government is aware that the initiative could result in additional financial burden for MSMEs, Perez said local government units (LGUs) could help them meet this requirement.
“With devolution, [especially with] universal health care, LGUs will have a bigger role. I think it would be consistent all around if LGUs will focus on this. So we’ll work with them on that,” Perez said at the sidelines of the celebration of World Population Day held in Quezon City. “[Department of the Interior and Local Government] Secretary [Eduardo M.] Año already issued an order to all LGUs to have a local population officer.”
Perez said Popcom will have to work with the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to craft the law since the proposed requirement will touch on provisions of the Labor Code.
He noted that institutionalizing family planning in the workplace is part of the conditions of work for all Filipino workers as indicated in the Labor Code.
Involving the workplace, Perez said, is necessary to boost government’s efforts to bring down the country’s total fertility rate—the average number of children born per woman—to 2.1 by 2022.
“The companies are not providing it except for the top 4,000 companies which are required by law to have a clinic. But even among the 4,000 companies, the DOLE said they can only monitor over 1,000. These are the companies with 200 or more employees,” he said.
“So the problem [is], those below 200, which is 99 percent of the enterprises, we don’t know if they’re providing family planning. That’s what we should focus on,” he added.
Perez noted that the government can bring down birth rate if it can register around 3 to 4 million women in a family planning program between 2019 and 2022, or 1 million women every year.
For this to happen, the government will need 100,000 volunteers and spend P10.4 billion in the next three years to boost the government’s population control program. These efforts, Perez said, were approved by the President in March.
Hitting this target, Perez said, could be an uphill climb in urban areas since 1 in every 3 women in the workforce have unwanted pregnancies. He said the DOLE estimated that there are 10 million women in the workforce and 3 million of them have unwanted pregnancies.
In terms of contraceptive use, the Popcom official said the target of the government is to increase it to 65 percent by 2022. He said this can be achieved given the country’s gains in terms of family planning in the past 20 years.
Popcom said significant progress has been made from 1994 for instance in total fertility rate [the number of children born or likely to be born to a woman in her lifetime], which slowed to 2.7 in 2017, from 4.1 in 1993 as a result of the increase in modern contraceptive prevalence rate to 40 percent in 2017, from 25 percent in 1993.
Data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) indicate that the country’s population continues to increase, as three babies are born per minute. The rate of growth, however, has declined to 1.76 percent annually since the 2015 population census.
Given this growth rate, the country’s population is expected to double in 39 years. From the current 108 million, Philippine population could reach 216 million in 20158. By year-end, the country’s population is expected to increase to 110 million.