100M population is an opportunity?

SMOKESCREEN: Malacanang is throwing a smokescreen when it says now that the country’s population hitting 100 million this year is both “a challenge and an opportunity.”

It is clear to most people who had followed the national debate over contraception and abortion on the way to the acrimonious passage last year of a so-called Reproductive Health law that the administration’s unbending position has been in support of population control.

It is agreed that looking after a 100-million population is a challenge. But never had Malacanang welcomed a growing population as an “opportunity,” as Press Secretary Sonny Coloma put it on government radio last Sunday.

The Commission on Population said days ago that in the third or fourth quarter of this year, the national population could hit 100 million. The National Statistical Coordination Board projected the number to have reached 97.35 million in 2013.

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OBFUSCATION: Has the fact finally dawned on the Palace that a robust population, whose growth actually has slowed down to manageable level in the Philippines, is now an asset in an aging world competing for educated and trained younger workers?

“It is both a challenge and an opportunity because people are the most important resource,” Coloma said of the 100-million population. His statement sounded like resignation to a demographic reality — or more of a lame attempt at obfuscation.

If his new view reflects evolving policy, we hope to see more billions being spent on quality education and upgraded social services than on government purchase of condoms, contraceptives and abortion-inducing pills and injectibles.

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RELATIVISM: The point brings us back to Deacon Keith Fournier whose article on Catholic Online we started to share in last Sunday’s Postscript. Taking off from a recent homily of Pope Francis he delved into human nature, human rights and on Catholics being active in politics.

The Holy Father delivered the stern point that for a leader to govern properly he must love his people and rule with humility.

Stressing that the problem confronting the United States and most of the civilized world is moral, Fournier said:

“We are living under what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) labeled a Dictatorship of Relativism. Relativism is a philosophy which says there is nothing objectively true. When there are no objective moral truths — which can be known by all and form the basis of our common life — there is no basis for true and responsible freedom.

“Freedom can never be realized, nor can it flourish, unless it is exercised in reference to choosing what is true and pursuing what is good.

“As a nation we have lost our moral compass. As a direct result we are losing the very meaning of freedom. There can be no good governance in a nation when its moral foundations are gone. When a society fails to recognize that persons are more important than things, it devolves into practical materialism.”

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RIGHT TO LIFE: Fournier said: “The political leaders of our nation (US) may still use the language of human rights but the words have lost any moral content. Human rights do not exist in a vacuum; they are goods of the human person.

“When there is no recognition of a preeminent right to life, there soon follows an erosion of the entire structure of all human rights. We are at that stage, and we cannot sit idly by.

“Failing to recognize that our first neighbors in the womb have a right to be born and live a full life as our neighbors in our community is the foundational failure we face as a nation. It is a rejection of our obligation in solidarity to one another. It denies the truth of being our brothers’ (and sisters’) keeper.

“Catholic social teaching on the necessity of every nation giving a love of preference to the poor is rooted on our insistence that they have equal human dignity to everyone else, including children in the womb.

“Without the freedom to be born, all of the talk about compassion for the poor and the promotion of freedom throughout the entirety of life, and how we attain it, is hollow and empty. Mother Teresa coined the phrase ‘poorest of the poor’ in referring to children in the womb.”

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GIFT OF CHILD: Fournier recalled what Mother Teresa said in 1994: “The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.

“It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts — a child — as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience.

“It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.

“Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.

“There is no solidarity in a culture that kills its own children and calls such evil a legal right. What we face is a moral crisis.”

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RESEARCH: Access past POSTSCRIPTs at manilamail.com. Follow us via Twitter.com/@FDPascual. Send feedback to [email protected]