An Act Establishing a Program to Help Children Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, Appropriating Funds Therefor, and for Other Purposes

This creates a Bangsamoro Council on Autism under the Office of the Chief Minister and directs it to build a regional program for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

The Council is chaired by the Minister of Health with the Minister of Basic, Higher and Technical Education as vice-chair, and seats the Ministers of Social Services and Development and of the Interior and Local Government, a representative of the Autism Society of the Philippines, and two representatives from non-governmental organizations working in the field.

Its functions are to formulate an integrated and comprehensive program, to create the framework that serves as its blueprint, to increase public awareness, education and information, and to establish family support networks and other programs for families, encouraging them to seek psycho-social support.

The program itself must include early screening and detection, and the bill goes on to provide for a secretariat, research and reports on autism spectrum disorder, an annual report to Parliament, implementation arrangements and an appropriation.

The policy section commits the Bangsamoro Government to the total well-being of those diagnosed with autism — physical, mental, moral, intellectual and social — so they can be productive members of society, and to creating conditions in which they become independent, self-reliant and socially accepted.

The unstated problem is diagnosis. Specialist developmental assessment in this region is scarce to non-existent outside the cities, which means most autistic children here are never formally identified, and services that depend on a diagnosis therefore never reach them.

Early screening and detection is the right first provision and the one that will determine whether any of the rest happens. In most of this region a child is not assessed by a developmental specialist because there is no developmental specialist to assess them, so the number of diagnosed autistic children is a measure of service availability rather than of prevalence. A program built on early screening at least starts where the gap is.

The language in Section 3 has not aged well and a committee should look at it. Two of the seven seats go to NGOs "involved in the advocacy for the prevention, cure and rehabilitation of persons with ASD". Prevention and cure describe a way of thinking about autism that clinical practice and autistic people’s own organizations have largely moved away from — autism is a developmental difference to be supported, not a disease to be cured — and the choice of NGO seats will follow the words used to describe them. The rest of the bill, which talks about support, acceptance and family networks, does not read the same way, which suggests the phrase was carried in from older model text rather than chosen.

The body it creates is a council with a secretariat and a reporting duty, which is the modest end of what could have been done. There is no entitlement, no service standard and no obligation on any ministry to deliver anything specific — the Council formulates a program, and whether it exists in a municipality depends on what the framework says and what the budget provides.

It carries 9 principal authors, and was referred to the Committees on Health and on Women, Youth, Children and Persons with Disability in February 2025.