A HOUSE panel on Thursday approved bills legalizing divorce and recognizing church annulments in the Philippines.
The House population and family relations committee passed in principle measures that would allow married couples to divorce and to recognize church annulments, declaration of nullity, and dissolution of marriages.
Albay Rep. Edcel C. Lagman, author of one of the proposed bills, noted that the Philippines and Vatican City, which has a population of about 800 who are mostly priests and nuns, are the only remaining states that have not legalized divorce.
“Absolute divorce is not for everybody. The overwhelming majority of Filipino married couples have happy and enduring relationships… (but it is) urgently necessary in exceptional cases for couples in inordinately toxic and irreparably dysfunctional marriages, particularly the wives who are abused or abandoned,” Mr. Lagman said in his sponsorship speech.
Davao Del Norte Rep. Pantaleon D. Alvarez, author of another of the proposed bills, said that “compatibility is not something easy and best discovered at the start of a relationship,” and that the current system “requires them to spend a fortune and ruin each other in front of a judge applying a cold and uncaring law.”
The panel also approved bills seeking for civil recognition of church annulments, declaration of nullity, and dissolution of marriages.
Enacting the measure into law “removes the burden of undergoing the civil annulment process,” TINGOG Party-list Rep. Jude A. Acidre, who authored the bills, told the committee.
Mr. Lagman was assigned to head the technical working group that would craft a substitute bill consolidating the different bills. Mr. Acidre proposed that measures seeking to recognize civil effects of church annulment will be considered separately from the bills proposing an absolute divorce. — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz
