President Rodrigo Duterte speaks during an event in Manila. File

Manolo B. Jara, Correspondent  

Birth control advocates raised the red flag and urged President Rodrigo "Rody" Duterte to declare the soaring number of teenage pregnancies a "national emergency," warning this could lead to an "inter-generational poverty."

Juan Antonio Perez, the head of the Commission on Population and Development (PopCom), explained this meant that couples would likely have a hard time improving their lives if they become parents at a very young age.

"For minors who start to have a family at a young age, it is most likely going to lead to a situation we call intergenerational poverty. This means the family will pass on poverty from generation to generation," Perez pointed out in at the launch of "No More Children Having Children" to raise awareness of Filipino teenagers becoming mothers too soon.

He added: "Our adolescents deserve the best start in their young lives, and we can do that by not allowing Filipino children to have children."

Data provided by PopCom and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) are, indeed, alarming. For instance, PSA reported that about 200,000 Filipino women between the age of 10 and 19 have given birth in 2017.

At that rate, PSA said this means that adolescent mothers in the country give birth to 24 babies every hour, or one newborn baby every 2.5 minutes. More worrisome, Perez said, is that teenage mothers have a higher prevalence of health risks.

Such risks, Perez said, include premature delivery, low birth weight among infants, complications at birth and inborn anatomical defects.

Early childbearing also reduces the probability of teenage women completing their education, thus "drastically reducing their earning capacity" which has an adverse impact on their changes of escaping poverty, Perez warned.

In this light, Perez and other family planning advocates urged President Duterte to declare the alarming rise in Filipino teenagers becoming mothers a "national emergency" not only to raise awareness but also encourage Congress, for instance, to enact laws to help solve the problem.

One such law will allow pregnant teenagers, as well as those who suffered a miscarriage, to have easy access to modern family planning services without requiring consent from their parents, Perez emphasized.

It was also noted that even the UN has noted that among the six major economies in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Philippines has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies and "is the only country where the rate is still increasing."

The Philippines has passed a birth control law but demographers lamented that its implementation continues to be derailed by stiff opposition from the influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines.

In an unrelated de