OVERVIEW
The welfare
of the nation is the welfare of the Filipino family, and prosperous
nations emanate from prosperous families. A family's ability
to contribute to national progress, in turn, depends on how
well individual members have been nourished to the fullness
of their potentials. Therefore, poor health, low education
and lack of opportunities for family members to become valuable
citizens hold back economic growth and national progress.
In turn, derailed development retards the growth of individual
citizens.
The
State of the Philippine Population Report (SPPR) is an attempt
to identify crucial population constraints to equitable development
and to spell out ways to overcome them. One such constraint
is the inability of couples to realize their desired family
size.
When
a couple does not have the means or the knowledge to have
just the number of children that they can nourish and care
for well, plans for a happy family life and a bright future
for the children get disrupted. When income is small, everything
goes to the daily subsistence of the growing number of household
members. Hardly anything is left for the children's education,
the health care
of mothers and babies, and the improvement of the living standards
of the family.
The
result: The family remains poor, children are sickly and do
not get a good education, and women, burdened with childbearing
and housework, cannot get opportunities to develop their skills
and engage in more productive activities. The family, struggling
in poverty, is unable to make substantial contributions
to society in terms of human resources, productive outputs
or sharing in the costs of development. There
is clearly an unmet need for family planning, judging from
survey results showing a big difference between the number
of children that couples desire and the number of children
that they actually have. There are many factors why there
is this unmet need, including lack of information and access
to reproductive health services. One important factor is the
power imbalance between men and women in the Filipino household.
Since husbands are often less inclined to practice family
planning and reproductive health, and since social norms dictate
that wives submit to their husbands' decisions, the need to
limit or space childbearing is often unsatisfied.
High
levels of unmet need have costly consequences: women suffer,
children die, lives are wasted, poverty worsens, and the economy
becomes weak and unstable. Obviously, the issue of unmet need
goes beyond the boundaries of the home and the reach of the
health clinic. It traverses the social, cultural and economic
aspects of development.
Unmet
need is more serious among the poor, the weak, and those with
less access to resources. As such, they become even more disadvantaged
the longer their unmet need is unattended. The matter definitely
calls for strong policy reforms and legislative actions at
the national and local levels.
There
have been efforts to address unmet need in family planning
and reproductive health — by government, but mostly by
nongovernment agencies. The proportion of these efforts to
the magnitude of the need, however, is still not enough to
make a significant impact on national development outcomes
and the overall quality of life of Filipinos. It is now time
for all concerned to share in the effort to act on unmet need
— to empower the women, sensitize the men, and allow
every Filipino family to be what it can be, and the country
to move ahead and attain its development goals.
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