NewsWire: 1/15/21
- According to new estimates, the Philippines saw a tidal wave of unplanned pregnancies in 2020 thanks to the pandemic. As other countries struggle with baby busts, officials in the Philippines are worried that they’ll lose the progress they’ve made in bringing down the birthrate. (Los Angeles Times)
- NH: While most other East Asian countries are doing everything they can to raise historically low birthrates (which are even plunging faster during the pandemic), the Philippines is facing the opposite problem: a baby boom.
- At last count (2018), the Philippines's total fertility rate (TFR) stood at 2.58. Though this number has steadily declined in recent decades, it remains the highest by far in East Asia. According to the University of the Philippines Population Institute and the United Nations Population Fund, however, the Philippines' TFR could rise as high as 3.0 in 2020, roughly back where it was in 2012. That's an extraordinary jump.
- What's driving this resurgence? The demographers point to a very large climb in unintended pregnancies--up to as many as 751,000 last year.
- This is unwelcome news for the government, which has spent the past decade trying alleviate poverty by bringing down the country’s high fertility rate. Roughly 80% of Filipinos are Catholic, and any federal efforts at family planning policies were long stymied by the powerful Catholic Church and its allies. Teenage birthrates in the Philippines have long been vastly higher than in neighboring countries.
- Public opinion is apparently divided. Although voters typically elect candidates endorsed by the Catholic Church, surveys show widespread support for policies that would help limit family size. According to a 2016 poll, 86% of Filipinos support government-supported reproductive health services.
- In 2012, after a 13-year legislative battle, the government finally passed a law that mandated access to free contraceptives for all women and the teaching of sex education in schools. But the clout of the church meant that these preferences were not reflected in actual administration. Sex education was largely abstinence-only. And though birth control was available in cities, it was harder to find in rural areas and too expensive for the very poor.
- As a result, the new law did not slow births significantly below trend. The population growth rate from 2015 to 2019 was 1.52%, compared to 1.73% between 2010 and 2015.
- Family planning picked up energy again with the election of Rodrigo Duterte as president in 2016. A tough-talking populist who loathes the Catholic Church, Duterte was happy to sign an executive order in 2017 requiring local governments to enforce the entire law. He made it clear that he expected to see more progress in the coming years.
- But progress on controlling births in the Philippines remains illusive. In 2020, the pandemic appears to have pushed births back up again, in part because fighting Covid-19 consumed most of the health system’s resources that had been dedicated to family planning. Paradoxically, Philippines is struggling mightily to push births down at the very time that almost every other East Asian country is trying just a hard to pull them up.
