In defense of an imperfect good thing

That your heart is in the right place matters more than whether you have a big heart. When you are hungry, it matters more that you have food to eat than whether you are having a healthy salad or greasy fries. When you have three children dying every day from a preventable cause such as a road crash, it matters more that you try to bring those numbers down than that you have a road safety plan that pleases everyone but comes 1,095 lives too late, for instance.

Parents are understandably concerned about the enforcement of Republic Act No. 11229 (the Child Safety in Motor Vehicles Act). A child car seat is an added expense. We can cite repeatedly that it costs much less than your accumulated weekly Starbucks coffee or mid-fancy milk tea, but hundreds of thousands of parents have likely already given up their usual coffee treats or milk tea for the past year anyway, to pay for added computer units and upgraded internet service and headphones and anti-bluelight eye glasses for the kids who have had to go to school online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who do not belong to the part of the population who have their coffee in cafés would simply resent the analogy, and we need to remember that the café-going lot is not a majority. Far from it.

Many call it bad timing to enforce the law at a time when many families have at least one member who used to earn a salary and doesn’t anymore, as a result of businesses shutting down either to ride out the pandemic or for good. Plus, those below 15 years of age are not allowed to go out anyway per current mobility restrictions, as a means to keep SARS-CoV-2 or its mutations as far from anyone’s breathing space as possible.

Some have complained that it was all so sudden and people were not given enough time to prepare for compliance. RA 11229 was signed into law in February 2019—two years ago this month. The IRR was approved in December of that year; that’s a little more than a year ago. Implementing government agencies and their road safety partners have since then been trying to reach us—parents, car owners, and the general public—and tell us there is such a law now, and we have a year to prepare.

But COVID-19 happened. It hogged the spotlight, the national budget, the airwaves, and claimed more than its share of everyone’s anxiety quota. That’s a lot of attention taken off of other initiatives to save people’s lives, such as RA 11229.

Others have taken apart provisions of the law, such as the maximum height or age, with some making good cases of it. This is good; it brings authentic concerns to the fore, and will surely inform enforcement. These are feedback that ought to have reached the Land Transportation Office or the Department of Transportation (DOTr) over the past year.

The DOTr on Feb. 2 announced postponement of enforcement by at least three months. Would three or six months later be better timing? Perhaps. To be hopeful, by then some percentage of the population may have gotten COVID-19 vaccines; the number of cases has plateaued, more businesses have reopened, and families are starting to go out again. Or not. Yet.

But one thing I see: RA 11229 seeks to help save lives. We may not be ready to comply with it yet, enforcers may not be ready to enforce it yet. Heck, the law may need tweaks. But these do not take away from the spirit of the law, which is to reduce the number of road fatalities. “Preventable deaths” is what they are called, precisely because there are things humanly possible, steps that can be taken, to bring down the number of child deaths.

If we can’t go the whole mile yet, should we then refuse to move our feet? Must we always nearly throw the baby out with the bathwater?

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Leah Barona-Cruz is a member of the Los Baños-based Mind The Gap Communications, a small group of friends who seek to support good causes. The views expressed here are hers alone.