Why support Reproductive Health Bill: Even Pro-RH advocates admit no correlation between easing poverty and RH

Margaret Greene of USAID in a paper admitted that there is a poor link between poverty reduction and reproductive health. That, even having an RH policy or an increased knowledge in reproductive health, there is really no assurance at all that this will improve or reduce poverty in developing countries.


I will support the Reproductive Health bill because, the bill has very good provisions especially on averting maternal deaths due to pregnancy complications. In developing countries, one out of 65 women die due to complications in childbirth.According to the World Health Organization (WHO), ten million women die due to pregnancies and childbirth.


It is likewise, an excellent measure to protect women belong to the poor and poorest sectors from early death due to early child-bearing. In the research conducted by Greene (2008) it was revealed that:

"Every year, more than half a million mothers in low- and middle-income countries die giving birth, more than 9 million suffer pregnancy-related illnesses, and 10-20 million develop long-term disabilities as a result of complications"

This is true even here in the Philippines. As they say, every pregnant woman's foot is always at death's door. These deaths are preventable.

Most of these deaths and disabilities are preventable, but in many instances, the interventions are either not available to poor women or are too low-quality to be effective. Global, regional, and country-level estimates of maternal mortality show a clear connection between high rates of maternal mortality and poverty. More than 99 percent of maternal deaths occur in developing regions, and more than 85 percent occur in the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa and southern Central Asia (AbouZahr & Wardlaw, 2004).

If at all, support the RH bill because it is pro-health for women and children as well.

Maternal mortality and morbidity have an adverse impact on the education of children, but this impact is mediated by other contextual factors. Research in Indonesia and Mexico revealed that children whose mothers died had lower school enrollment and higher dropout rates (Gertler et al., 2003). In Rwanda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), children who lost a parent often postponed their education—however, this relationship may be hard to untangle from the loss of an adult breadwinner, as poor families are more vulnerable to interruptions in education (D’Souza,1994).

Now, is reproductive health policy and poverty interlinked? Even pro-RH advocates admit that having an RH policy does not necessarily improve economic conditions of countries.

Simple, clear-cut causality between reproductive health and poverty reduction is very difficult to demonstrate. Existing research has not thoroughly addressed the effects of poor reproductive health on household poverty, and further research is needed to clarify these links. Specifically, we need microanalysis to analyze these complex, context-specific householdlevel relationships. (Greene, Poor Health, Poor Women: How Reproductive Health affects poverty", USAID, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008, p.9)