5 Proposed recommendation: Recognize and fulfill the obligations of the state party, particularly courts, to respect and protect women’s and girls’ fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution and international law and allow minors and married individuals to access on their own all reproductive health services including modern contraceptives by removing any requirement of third-party consent in the RPRHA. The disproportionate harm suffered by vulnerable groups of women is exacerbated by the state party’s continued prioritization of “family” and “marriage” over access to essential reproductive health services. While U.N. human rights bodies including the Committee have already called on states not to require third-party consent for individuals including minors to access reproductive health services,48 the state party has not taken any steps since the Committee’s last review to remove the curtailment of married women’s and minors’ access to certain reproductive health services. As earlier mentioned, the Imbong decision resulted in a requirement wherein all minors, including those who have already experienced pregnancy, should secure written parental consent to access modern contraceptives and non-emergency reproductive health procedures.49 The court found as “anti-family” and “deplorable…the debarment of parental consent in cases where the minor, who will be undergoing a procedure, is already a parent or has had a miscarriage”.50 Further, Imbong also restricted married women’s access to elective reproductive health procedures such as ligation.51 The Court explained that to not require spousal consent would violate the policy of the state party to protect marriage as an inviolable social institution and that, absent any compelling state interest, a decision involving a reproductive health procedure “is a private matter which belongs to the couple, not just one of them.”52 In accordance with the Committee’s General Recommendation 24, the PCHR in 2016 called on the state party to “issue a policy upholding women’s autonomy over her body, and dismissing the need for the consent of relatives or spouse.”53 In its 2016 national inquiry report, the PCHR found that the Imbong decision has been used by “some government health facilities and health service providers in seeking parental consent for minors and in refusing tubal ligation for married women without the consent of their husbands” and that the parental consent requirement is linked to the rise of adolescent pregnancies.54 Proposed recommendation: Recognize and fulfill the obligations of the state party, particularly courts, to prioritize women’s and girls’ fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution, RPRHA, and international law over religious ideologies by not allowing institutions to practice religion-based refusals of care and requiring health care providers refusing to provide care based on religious convictions to refer all patients to an accessible alternative health care provider. The Committee has expressed that state parties should only permit individuals, and not institutions, to invoke “conscientious objection” by ensuring that it “remains a personal decision rather than an institutionalized practice.”55 In its summary report, the Committee also recommended that the state party “establish a regulatory framework and mechanism for the practice of conscientious objection by individual health professionals” to ensure women’s access to sexual and reproductive health services.56