PopCom workers struggle to bring population down amid pandemic

AHLETTE Reyes, 43, starts her day thinking about how she can reach out to poor Filipino couples who are locked in their homes as community quarantine measures still prevailed in Eastern Visayas due to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic.

"We have intensified our campaign using all platforms in this pandemic era to get the right information and services to couples and individuals who want to utilize any of the available family planning methods," said Reyes, who works as an information officer at the Commission on Population and Development (PopCom) regional office based in Palo, Leyte.

As radio remains a popular and affordable source of news and information in the countryside, PopCom brings the Responsible Parenthood and Family Planning (RPFP) class to the airwaves to reach out to people in the communities who need information and services for family planning.

Dubbed as "RPFP-On-The-Air," the radio program serves as a support mechanism for the regional office and its counterparts in the different provinces and towns in Eastern Visayas for its demand generation and family planning service provision.

"We are shaping it into a best practice. It's evolving into its best form just yet," Reyes told Sunstar Philippines.

The program, co-hosted by senior PopCom Information Officer Reyan Arinto and other PopCom personnel, is aired twice a week or every Tuesday and Thursday over Birada Teleradyo, with simulcast airing on IBC 6, 98.3 Magik FM Tacloban, 87.7 Idol Radio in Palo, 106. 1 Star Radio in Catbalogan City, and 103.1 Radio Kabulig (San Policarpo) in Eastern Samar.

PopCom said it wanted to raise awareness, education, and motivate the community at the grassroots level to adopt family planning through the radio program.

"The RPFP program aims to enable couples and individuals to achieve their fertility intentions specifically on the number, timing, and spacing of children within the context of responsible parenthood and informed choice," said Elnora Pulma, PopCom regional director.

The listeners can also be provided with referral services of desired family planning methods through their volunteers in the villages.

The radio program also provides support in the dissemination of accurate information about the Covid-19, like on its prevention and referral to appropriate service providers.

"With multiple community quarantine being enforced, couples and individuals' need for family planning services may be hampered and this can lead to unintended and unplanned pregnancies which will have an effect on our population," Pulma said.

Aside from hosting a radio program, PopCom also relaunched its popular puppet show "Neneng and Biboy" via Facebook and established a helpline on family planning issues for the public.

The puppet show highlights age-appropriate information to adolescents while the helpline serves as an integrated information and services delivery network and mechanism "for easier coordination and referral of family planning, adolescent health, and development as well as the coronavirus disease."

Adolescent Health and Development information will also be made available through the helpline to ensure that adolescents and the youth will have access to comprehensive health care and services and provide a ready referral for counseling.

The agency has trained a pool of helpline responders to provide accurate, relevant, timely, and essential information on Responsible Parenthood and Family Planning, Adolescent Health and Development, other reproductive health concerns such as prevention of maternal health, men's involvement in responsible parenthood and family planning, gender-based violence and other sexual health concerns.

The helpline is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

However, Pulma reminded the public to allow only relevant and important calls so that the responders can provide timely assistance to those who need it.

The commission maintained that family planning in a crisis-affected population is critical to meeting the needs of women and girls and which can save women's lives and improves their health.

"In times of pandemics, it is also wise to see its effects on demography, as it is important to look not only deaths but also births. Illness, quarantine, and death can all have a major impact on conception, pregnancy, and birth," Pulma said.

According to Pulma, reaching women and adolescent girls affected by crises with family planning is critical to the vision of values of equity and equality among women and girls.

She added that lockdowns may reduce women's access to family planning which leads to unplanned pregnancies.

"As the legends go, major natural disasters, pandemics, and other events that force people to stay indoors are followed by increased births. Such a disruption, as evidenced by figures from the National Demographic Health Survey, may have played a role in the pregnancy spike years ago after Super Typhoon Yolanda ravaged many parts of the country, especially the Eastern Visayas region," according to the commission.

For 2020, the regional population office targets to reach 64,396 couples to be provided with information and given an informed choice to choose their desired family planning service.

It also targets to serve 7,738 couples with any of the family planning methods.

In Eastern Visayas alone, the lockdowns caused logistics delay in the distribution of one million pills, 200,000 condoms, and 126,000 progestin subdermal implants to the residents in the region, Philippine News Agency reported.

'Unfavorable impact'

PopCom National Executive Director Juan Antonio Perez III disclosed that nearly two million Filipino women of reproductive age, or those between 15 to 49 years old, will get pregnant this year, leading to an additional 214,000 unplanned births.

It is also believed that 10 percent of the births will be among women below 20 years of age, also with an additional 5,000 pregnancies, PopCom said, citing a recent projection from the University of the Philippines Population Institute (UPPI) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

The study estimated the "potential unfavorable impact" of the pandemic on family planning efforts in the Philippines.

"Looking at these numbers, we foresee that because of the restrictions of movement, as well as the reduction of access of women and men to family planning supplies, there will be at least one pregnancy for every three women with an unmet need for family planning," Perez said in a statement.

"Those are just some of the adverse impacts of the community quarantine to the welfare of our families, which further aggravates the situation of the ongoing health crisis," he added.

Among women 15 to 49 years old, there are about 3,099,000 with unmet need for family planning exacerbated by the pandemic, according to the study.

With family-planning services impeded due to the nationwide implementation of community quarantines, an additional 590,000 might be added to the figure, bringing the total to 3,688,000-a 19-percent jump, it said.

PopCom said there were 1.668 million births in 2018, thus an additional 214,000 would push the number to almost 1.9 million in 2021.

"More distressing are the figures for teenagers, or those between 15 and 19 years old: From an initial estimate of 163,000 adolescents with unmet need for family planning, the lockdown will swell this number to 15,000, aggregating the entire set at 178,000, or a surge of 9.3 percent," the commission said.

Meanwhile, PopCom projected a decline of 2.2 percent contraceptive prevalence rate or the percentage of women who use any method of modern contraception.

This means over 400,000 women will drop out of the country's family planning program.

"While the numbers are staggering, this should sound the alarm for everyone that as the pandemic rages on, family planning should still be top-of-mind for everyone -- not only for those directly involved in service-delivery, but also for all men and women -- mothers and fathers, and even our teenage children -- who can make a difference by doing their very best to avoid being added as a statistic to the abovementioned numbers; that is, to ensure that they help reduce the incidences of unplanned pregnancies," said Perez. (SunStar Philippines)