Editorial Team: Edelina P. dela Paz, Ross Mayor, Joyce P. Valbuena, Noemi B. Leis
Artworks: Boy Dominguez and RJ Ilusorio
Price: Php150
The Primary Health Care (PHC) approach has provided the shift in perspective from a medicalized and biomedical framework to a more sociopolitical-cultural and biopsychosocial approach to health. The principles of PHC clearly embody the role of social determinants in health, ie, poverty, inequity, social injustice, as factors lying outside the medical and public health services that strongly determine health. As we look at the experiences of countries, it is evident that countries which achieved the more lasting improvements in health were those with a commitment to equitable development.
It is on these premises that the focus on sexual and reproductive health should not be on population control or sex act itself (as is the direction of the current debate), but on population as it relates to poverty, environment, education and other social issues. The campaign for the recognition of sexual and reproductive health and rights should be seen in the overall pursuit of human rights, including the right to health and the right to development. These rights can only be attained if we struggle against unequal and unjust social, economic and political structures which are the root causes of poverty, ill health, and underdevelopment.
