When religious dogma clashes with democracy

Philippine Catholic hierarchs deem all contraceptives — including condoms, vasectomy, and tubal ligation — as abortifacients. If confronted with scientific proof to the contrary, they shift argument to the readiness of natural family-planning methods. Rhythm and Billings conform to the female’s monthly ovulation, during which the couple can avoid sex. Yet the wife also naturally feels sexiest during ovulation, and the loving husband obliges. To avoid pregnancy they might resort to sexual manipulations other than coition. There again, the hierarchs admonish that withdrawal, as with masturbation and similar ways of climaxing, are sinful because onanistic.

That’s when the most basic insistence of the hierarchs emerges: the sole function of sex is procreation. Bottom line, pleasurable sex is wrong if not for pregnancy. The only pure alternative is abstinence. Alongside it are other strictures, like chastity and marriage before procreative sex.

Unfortunately, if natural methods are so difficult to observe, then more so is abstinence. The Church intellectual Augustine understood human frailty. Not all men could live like saints. And so he quipped in confession, “Lord, make me chaste — but not yet.”

The impracticality of abstinence has led to the present situation in the 80-percent Catholic Philippines:

• a 100-million population — double what its resources presently can sustain, and still growing at more than two percent yearly;

• a 33-percent poverty rate, with the poorest households weighed down by too many mouths to feed, and too little knowledge and means to plan family size;

• eleven mothers dying each day giving birth, mostly because of one too many, too frequent unplanned pregnancies;

• a malnutrition rate of 26 percent among children below five years old; and

• 79,000 backstreet abortions of unwanted pregnancies in 2000, confirmed in government hospitals only because of serious aftermaths; meaning, the volume can only be higher through the decade, considering the unreported cases.

Again Catholic hierarchs have a way of dismissing such figures. Supposedly those are concocted by sinister western imperialistic groups that want to rein in Philippine population for easier domination. If again confronted with government and private studies, the hierarchs point to other causes. Bureaucratic corruption, tax evasion, and corporate and individual greed, they say, are to blame for the poverty and ignorance all around. The government is striving to curb the maladies. Still, the Catholic hierarchs insist that the solution is in charity — sharing everything with everyone.

Absolute chastity and charity are impossible in this imperfect world. That is why health and women’s groups for two decades have been advocating state support for reproductive rights.

Pending in Congress is a Reproductive Health Bill that would:

(1) ensure health care for mothers, newborns, and toddlers; 

(2) teach the public, starting at inquisitive pubescence, about reproductive health, rights, and restraint;

(3) afford couples the freedom to learn and the means to plan families and space pregnancies;

(4) obligate the national and local governments to prioritize the citizens’ reproductive health and welfare; and

(5) slow down the runaway population growth rate.

The present version of the RH Bill would be up for voting at the 286-member House of Representatives on Tuesday. After that, rough sailing is expected at the Senate. The chamber leaders who control the agenda — the Senate President, Majority Leader, and Assistant Majority Leader — are against the proposed law.

Both the House and the Senate must assent for any proposal to be enacted. If the RH Bill passes in the House, the Catholic hierarchs would be banking on the three Senate leaders to shelve any voting in their chamber.

The bill’s proponents are praying that elected leaders would heed the sentiment of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. As stated in survey after survey, up to 85 percent of Filipinos believe that the government actively should participate in population planning. And up to 65 percent say they need help in family planning.

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A map of China published in 1904 shows the southernmost extent of its territory to end with Hainan island-province. Printed by the Shanghai Publishing House, the Han-Chinese map excludes the Paracel and Spratly archipelagoes. It effectively debunks China’s so-called historic rights to the islands rich in oil and food resources. (Click to the link: http://tuoitrenews.vn/cmlink/tuoitrenews/society/spratlys-paracels-not-on-1904-chinese-map-1.80705)

Discovery of the map by a Vietnamese science-history researcher, Dr. Mai Hong, has left Beijing speechless. Of late it has been asserting militarily its claims not only over the two archipelagoes but also shoals, reefs and banks close to the Philippines. A growing number of Chinese intellectuals are beginning to question the basis for their government’s territorial claims.

A land power for four millenniums, China was never known to be a maritime power in the region. Historical accounts show that Chinese explorers depended on Malay ships to voyage to Borneo, Ceylon and India. True mariners, the Malay ancestors of present-day Filipinos, Indonesians and Malaysians had conquered Madagascar, 4,000 miles away in Africa, two millenniums ago.

Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal, which China is grabbing, is part of the Philippine map under the U.S.-Spain Treaty of Paris of 1898. The Philippines includes the shoal and similar seamarks in its 200-mile exclusive economic zone under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

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