Divorce bill reaches House plenary

MANILA, Philippines — The divorce bill that Catholic bishops have vigorously opposed for decades has now reached the plenary level of the House of Representatives, where debates will begin.

Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel Lagman – author and principal advocate of the measure – delivered his sponsorship speech Monday, glad that it reached this far “just short of one year after the committee on population and family relations approved the substitute bill on divorce on 21 March 2023.”

He thanked Speaker Martin Romualdez and House Majority Leader Manuel Jose Dalipe for finally allowing House Bill 9349 or the Absolute Divorce Bill to be “sponsored and deliberated on in the plenary.”

The proposed divorce bill, he said, will not open the floodgates to divorces. Absolute divorce is not for everybody as “the overwhelming majority of Filipino marriages are happy, enduring and loving. They do not need the divorce law.”

“An absolute divorce law is urgently necessary for marriages which have collapsed and are beyond repair, where the majority of the victims are the wives who have been subjected to cruelty, violence, infidelity and abandonment,” he explained.

Lagman, president of the opposition Liberal Party, stressed that “in the grant of absolute divorce, no marriage is destroyed because the union has long perished.”

Grounds for absolute divorce under the bill are: if the spouses have been separated for at least five years and reconciliation is highly improbable; if they have been legally separated by judicial decree for at least two years; if one of the spouses has undergone a sex reassignment surgery or transitioned to another sex; if they have irreconcilable differences and other forms of domestic or marital abuse.

These are in addition to dissolution of marriage based on psychological incapacity, legal separation and annulment of marriage.

“Divorce stories can also be love stories,” Lagman said.