A group of Catholic lay people on Tuesday expressed their objection to the reproductive health (RH) bill and urged government to implement alternatives to it. The Sangguniang Laiko ng Pilipinas (Laiko) said the RH bill would make legal government funding for population control measures "found scientifically harmful and hazardous to women’s health by the World Health Organization." In an article posted on the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) news site, Laiko urged the government instead to:
increase the budget for existing government hospitals and health centers; and provide the necessary medicines and equipment for indigent patients; construct more government hospitals and health centers in the rural areas; train a work force in the barangay level for health care and sanitation services; raise the salaries and benefits of government health care workers, and providing the necessary security of tenure to doctors, nurses, and other staff. Laiko: Proposed RH services inhumane Laiko national president Edgardo Tirona said the RH services promoted by the United Nations and supported by the government allegedly includes abortion which "we believe, the RH Bill tacitly approves" and which prolife groups find as inhumane. Laiko also expressed concern about the government’s classification of contraceptives as "essential medicines" that can be purchased at all national and local hospitals and other government health units. This policy may make pregnancy "appear like a disease that must be treated," Laiko said. Meanwhile,Laiko also criticized the RH bill's provision for mandatory education of Grade 5 pupils on sexuality and family planning. This unnecessarily exposes minors to sex education and violates the parents' constitutional rights to educate their children according to their moral and religious beliefs, Laiko said. The group added the bill violates health workers’ rights to decide according to one’s conscience by requiring them to participate in certain procedures including those leading to abortion. Laiko said health workers may become “unwilling accomplices to an act they believe as immoral and unacceptable." The group also believes the “main cause of poverty in the country is corruption, abetted by sub-standard dispensation of justice due to inefficient governance." RH bill 96 Several versions of the RH bill have been filed inn previous Philippine congresses. In the present Congress, Minority Leader Edcel Lagman of Albay is the main proponent of the RH bill is known as "Bill 96." The bill is based on the premise that the country's population growth impedes economic development. The bill seeks to “guarantee to universal access to medically-safe, legal, affordable and quality reproductive health care services, methods, devices, supplies and relevant information." Contentious issue The RH bill has been a contentious issue in the country because it pits two powerful sectors against each other: prolife groups (such as Catholic and Muslim groups opposing the RH bill) and prochoice groups (led by non-government organizations supporting the RH bill). It is estimated that 80 percent of the country's population are baptized Catholics. According to the National Statistics Office, there were 88.57 million Filipinos as of August 2007. The projected population for 2010 is 94.01 million. The Catholic Church promotes only natural family planning and is opposed to the use of artificial birth control methods such as condoms and birth-control pills, saying these could lead to promiscuity and a rise in abortion cases. However, RH advocates say natural family planning methods have not proven to be as reliable as artificial means of birth control. The Catholic Church accepts only natural family planning (NFP) methods. The NFP has two distinct forms: Ecological breastfeeding (a form of child care that normally spaces babies about two years apart on the average) Systematic NFP (a system that uses a woman’s signs of fertility to determine the fertile and infertile times of her cycle) – VVP, GMANews.TV 
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