QUEZON City Mayor Herbert Bautista on Sunday blocked a Health department plan to distribute free condoms to public high school students to prevent the spread of HIV, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. “We will not allow the distribution of condoms in public schools. We will allow the use of Quezon City health facilities, but not the city’s public schools,” Bautisa told city health officer Verdades Linga in a text message. The city government’s epidemiology and surveillance unit refuted the claim of the Health department that Quezon City had already piloted the distribution of condoms. Despite opposition from the Catholic Church, Bautista approved the mandatory inclusion of reproductive health in the curriculum of all public secondary schools at a local health board meeting in September 2016. He also approved Linga’s recommendation to include in the curriculum demonstrations on the proper use of condom to high school students as well as the other contraceptives, an “important” component of HIV, AIDS and STD prevention. However, the condom distribution to students was a big no-no for the mayor. On Jan. 11, President Rodrigo Duterte signed Executive Order No. 12 to push the full implementation of the Reproductive Health Law. National Economic and Development Authority Director General Ernesto Pernia said the order would enable women of reproductive age to achieve their desired family size and number of children rather than having more children than they want or that they can provide for adequately. As early as in December, the Health department announced its plan to distribute condoms in schools in 2017 to arrest the sharp rise in the number of HIV and AIDS cases among the youth. The Health department said it would procure P50 million to P100 million worth of condoms to address the problem. Based on the Jan. 15 official statement of the Quezon City government, “the Department of Health is reportedly in the final stages of implementing the distribution of condoms in schools as part of its campaign against HIV-AIDS among the youth.” Secretary Paulyn Jean Rosell-Ubial said department is coordinating with the Department of Education to finalize the guidelines for the distribution of free condoms in public schools. She said their program managers informed her that Quezon City has already piloted the condom distribution in schools.But Bautista said “no condom distribution was ever made in any public school in Quezon City, contrary to the statement made last week by the Department of Health.” Human Rights Watch on Sunday praised the government for restoring funding to address the reproductive health needs of an estimated 13.4-million women who rely on state-supplied contraceptive products. The long-overdue move reverses a cut in those funds in January 2016 that threatened to roll back hard-fought gains in maternal health and reductions in infant mortality over the past decade, made possible by government-subsidized or free contraceptive services, said Carlos Conde, researcher, Asia Division, of Human Rights Watch, which has usually been critical of the Duterte administration, particularly for its bloody war on drugs. Conde said Duterte’s executive order was “a bright spot in the administration’s otherwise horrendous human rights record via its abusive war on drugs.” In January 2016, at the urging of the Catholic Church, conservative lawmakers surreptitiously cut by P1 billion the P2.2-billion budget for “family health and responsible parenting” guaranteed under the law, Conde said. That deprived low-income Filipinos, particularly women, access to government-supplied contraceptive products, he said. The United Nations Population Fund criticized the cut as a threat to “the basic human right to health as well as the right to reproductive choices.” The budget cut also dealt a blow to efforts to contain the Philippines worsening HIV epidemic. In a December 2016 report, Human Rights Watch decried the cuts as one of several government policies threatening to worsen the country’s HIV epidemic among men who have sex with men, fueled mainly by lack of access to condoms. Government clinics—often the main or only source of condoms for many Filipinos “are likely to exhaust their condom supplies in early 2017.” Conde said the bonus is now on the government, particularly the Department of Health, to ensure that relevant agencies disburse the allocated budgetary funds as intended. The millions of Filipino women and families who have been deprived of much-needed reproductive health services because of religious and conservative opposition have suffered long enough, Conde added. With Sandy Araneta