CEBU, Philippines - There is a time for dialogue and a time to make a stand.
About four years ago, I spoke before a school forum in Cebu on the RH bill to explain the Church's position on it. The preceding years saw me actively engaged in the issues of OFWs and their families, illegal drugs, and graft and corruption. I saw very real links between corruption and underdevelopment. I realized that there are still more good people in the country, only that those who are corrupt are better organized, better funded, and made a lot of noise. I also recognized the need for sectors to dialogue and come together for the common good.
My preparations for the forum made me see that the RH bill is really a Trojan horse to promote a contraceptive mentality and, in its wake, legalized abortion. Since it cannot afford to promote abortion head-on because of legal and public outcry, it slowly numbs our moral senses and drives a wedge at our legal and moral consensus, eventually leading to its acceptance. After all, who are funding the RH bill, and is not abortion part of their agenda? Did not abortion gain acceptance in the rest of the world, by stages?
What makes it even more insidious is that the RH bill mixes legitimate and urgent concerns, like poverty reduction and maternal health, with highly-funded population-control measures so that even well-meaning and intelligent individuals and groups can develop blind spots. The RH bill is indeed a well-funded and well-orchestrated campaign with a well thought-out communication plan that money can buy.
Very recently, a young man told me how way back in 2000 he and other student leaders of Cebu were invited to a seminar in a nice beach resort on the topic of leadership and gender equality. The funder was a well-known international funding agency. About four years later, more were invited and this time the topic was on reproductive health - with the youth now urged on, playing on their idealism, as advocates to others for a just cause with funding for activities. This time, with authority figures like lawyers and school authorities around, condom for safe sex was part of the discussion and they were asked how they would deal with pregnancies resulting from rape, a moral dilemma opening the doors to abortion.
The effort was amply funded by a well-known international foundation that did not even ask for an accounting trail. Then, this young man and his friends realized they were being taken in for a ride when they asked themselves: is this the right advocacy? They discerned well and had the courage to leave the program.
A trail of deception continues to our day. Just recently, I received a text message that had been forwarded to someone I knew. It had an urgent appeal: a signature campaign to counteract the signatures collected by RH bill proponents. Signature collected by prolife groups were to be forwarded to a specific address, and "no forms were needed." This made me suspicious. What is the guarantee this will not be used by the other side? I raised my observation. True enough, the appeal turned out to have come from a pro RH bill group.
Why the deceptions? If truth is really on the side of the RH bill and that the poor and women are really to be served by it, why take resort to such deceptions?
I have no illusion these stories will be even considered by those who promote or support the RH bill. I expect to be vilified. After all, the politically-correct and cool thing nowadays seems to be church bashing, picturing the church as unfeeling but totally disregarding the immense social services provided by the church. They picture celibates as having no say on the issue, as if judges would first have to commit crimes for them to be good judges. Wouldn't this silence Jesus on many issues, as well? Or they throw labels around like "Padre Damaso" with all its negative connotations, not recognizing that it can be applied to anyone who abuses power and may even be pointing to them. Some would even quote church teachings in a superficial way, totally disregarding the consistent position of the Church on artificial birth control. But then again, Jesus himself was once the target of such a strategy.
The RH bill has an unspoken mantra penetrating academic circles, media, opinion formers, decision makers, and other influential groups. It is that women have absolute rights over their bodies and that they have the right to protect themselves from hostile presences. And if the hostile presence is the husband, they have condoms and other contraceptives. If the hostile presence is a baby, then the "tumor" should be prevented or removed through contraceptives or through abortion. Isn't this what "essential medicines" imply?
This is a lie that can victimize even the most sincere or intelligent among us, including even some teachers or workers of Catholic schools. As Christians, we are taught that our bodies are the "temples of the Holy Spirit." We are just stewards of our bodies, answerable to God for what we do or fail to do with it. Pro RH bill groups talk about "human rights" but what about God's rights embedded in nature for our own good? Of what use are the other rights - political, economic, and social - when the most fundamental right - the right to life - is threatened? Who will exercise the right to assembly and freedom of speech when there are no people to assemble and to speak?
We Filipinos need to wake up to this massive deception brought on by moneyed and even racist interests. This copy-and-paste legislation - for its roots are traceable to international covenants that promote contraception and abortion - should be exposed for what it really is: an imposition of a foreign and anti-life culture that has hoodwinked even bright and well-intentioned individuals.
RH bill proponents accuse the Church of imposing its views on others. But is it only Catholics who contract cancer because of contraceptives? Is it only Catholics who will be subsidizing, through their taxes, the promiscuity promoted by the contraceptive culture? Is it only Catholics who would be prevented, by law, to express their views once the bill is approved?
We are also told that majority of Filipinos support the bill. Are people really provided with adequate and balanced information on the issue? Are further questions really allowed to surface? Or are they fed with half truths and given empty promises? Majority of Germans supported Hitler, didn't they - yet this does not justify Nazism, does it? Why is it that TV debates on the bill result in a significantly greater number of viewers voting for the prolife position?
The "common sense" of the RH bill reminds us of what a wise man once wrote: "Common sense almost invariably makes that mistake; for it is incapable of analyzing itself, incapable of making the discovery that it too is a specialized development of human knowledge, incapable of coming to grasp that its peculiar danger is to extend its legitimate concern for the concrete and the immediately practical into disregard of larger issues and indifference to long-term results."
Recently a well-known personality cursorily "acknowledged" my concern regarding zero-population growth that contraceptive mentality leads to. But he ended with the question: "But what about the present?" - meaning the poor.
Yes, what about the present? A good number of Catholics, other Christians, and people of good will are reaching out, with others, to serve the poor: birthing centers are being built as fruits of collaborative effort between certain government officials and Church workers; feeding centers served by convinced Catholics who are in government; scholarships grants for poor students made possible through partnerships between schools and church-based groups; and faith-driven individuals and groups, including NGOs, are coming together to reach out to street children. In contrast, the RH bill is the lazy person's approach to development that threatens and even punishes the very people it claims to help.
But we also need to look at our highly-dysfunctional socio-political system and groupings that hinder the poor from having access to educational and economic opportunities. How about the way we conduct our elections, as the original sin of graft and corruption - shouldn't we be doing something about this? How do we fight corruption while avoiding becoming the perpetrators we set out to demolish?
A newspaper columnist recently wrote "not much is being said in the debate about the effects of eventually having an aging population" (Frederico Pascual, "Grim Facts on Low Population Growth" in Postscript, Philippine Star, August 12, 2012). He reviews newspaper articles from Asia, Europe, and the USA citing grim effects of negative population growth. Even more telling is a very recent speech made by Lee Kwan Yew on the .78% birth rate of Singapore. The Singaporeans - as do other "developed" nations - have become victims of their own success in curbing their population ("Going Extinct is No Fun" by Michael Cook). Do we want to follow in their footsteps?
Alarmist? If these trends do not alarm us, then we have lost our souls.