Void

Undoubtedly, QC’s engine of growth with Mayor Sonny Belmonte at the driver’s seat is indeed running at full speed. The City is simply humming with so many economic activities and generating substantial investments all geared towards making it a boom town. Never has it been so financially sound as to be able to efficiently and satisfactorily deliver all the basic services to its residents, especially the poor. To be sure, were it not for the term limit, residents would like him to continue serving as their Mayor because of his outstanding record of good governance.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the City Council or more specifically Joseph Juico, Edcel Lagman Jr., Winston Castelo, Bayani Hipol, Jaime Borres, Eden Medina, Jorge Banal Jr., Dorothy Delarmente, Victor Ferrer Jr., Dante de Guzman, Diorella Sotto, Antonio Inton Jr.. Jesus C. Suntay, Vincent Belmonte, Concepcion Malangen and Alexis Grace Matias.

Apparently they succumbed to the pressures of international population control agencies out to impose and carry out their population control programs in this country to maintain access to our strategic resources. Time and again, our councilors have been reminded that these foreign groups and international financiers aim to depopulate our country by introducing harmful contraceptive products and services as well as by informing and indoctrinating the rising generation of children regarding the desirability of smaller family size. They have been warned that this program is re-designed to make it more enticing and apparently beneficial with the use of such words as “reproductive health”, “maternal and child care” “gender equality” “gender equity” “safe sex” and “informed choice”.

Sad to say however, the warning has fallen on ears deafened by apparently “irresistible pressures”. Last February 11, 2008, the City Council has scheduled for third and final reading the “Ordinance Establishing a Quezon City Population and Reproductive Health Management Policy” principally sponsored by so young a councilor by the name of Joseph Juico. Obviously, it is not his original work but a substantial reproduction of a master draft drawn up by these international agencies.

As expected the ordinance appears to be free of objectionable features. It even cites certain constitutional principles as bases. But on closer scrutiny, it becomes clear that its premises are wrong, some of its provisions are illegal and harmful to the residents both physically and spiritually, and it is an ultra vires act for being beyond the power of the City Council to enact.

In the first place, the ordinance speaks of population explosion in Quezon City that now stands at 2.5 million and continues to increase by 1.92% yearly. The truth however is that the population growth in QC is increasing because of migration of people from other areas rather than increase in birth rate. Thus it speaks only of high percentage of women who do want to bear children anymore, not the number of child being born.

In the second place, the ordinance is establishing a policy on population which is really of national concern that only Congress as the national policy making body could enact and establish. Its power is merely to implement the population policy set forth by Congress including programs and projects on reproductive health, maternal and child care (Section 17, par. 2 iii in relation to paragraph 4, Local Government Code).

Thirdly, while the ordinance requires “Adolescent Education” to be taught to students from 1st to 4th year high school instead of sex education, it still covers reproductive health and sexuality curriculum, and therefore infringes on the inherent right and duty of parents in the rearing of their children and development of their moral character (Article II Section 12, Constitution) as well as in the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions (Art. XV Section 3[1]). Experiences in other countries show that this kind of sex education promotes promiscuity that led to unwanted teen age pregnancies, yet our councilors looked the other way. Besides mandating sex education in schools may even violate academic freedom that is also enshrined in our Constitution.   

Fourth, the ordinance repeatedly and needlessly declares that the City Government does not and will not condone abortion, but at the same time it allows the use of a wide range of family planning methods, techniques and devices some of which have been medically proven to cause or induce abortion, cancer and other ailments that expose mothers and children to bodily and emotional risk. Indeed even the ordinance itself mentions post abortion complications, thus clearly implying that the contraceptive methods made available may lead to abortion.

Fifth, the very title of the ordinance itself mentions “reproductive health” which is repeated several times in the body. This is a generic term that has been designed by international agencies to advance their population control agenda. In reality it does not promote health but bring harm and endangers the lives and health of women and the unborn children because of the contraceptive methods they are using as already shown in other countries where these methods are used.

Sixth, it is true that the ordinance mandates that the City government shall promote only natural and artificial family planning methods that are “deemed safe and effective and considered part of the essential drug list”. But it failed to set the standards of safety and effectiveness and the drug list. Instead it entrusted to “national and international agencies” (obviously with vested interests) the determination of such standards and list thereby leaving in the latter’s hands, the health, safety and even the life of the QC residents! The lobby must have been really so irresistible.

Lastly, indeed the ordinance is so vague and ambiguous in most of it essential provisions that it can be considered void for its vagueness. It has even failed to impose appropriate sanctions and instead leave the said sanctions to the body the will formulate the implementing rules and regulations! This is definitely an undue delegation of a power which in the first place the council may not even have.

Remember these councilors come the next election. Don’t vote for them for any position they are seeking. Indeed they may even be charged before the Ombudsman for culpable violation of the Constitution and Laws.

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