First Things First

The Philippines inclines toward one-man rule

2011-12-27T22:37:00.000+08:00

By Francisco S. Tatad[1]

More than a thousand people died in the Philippine floods before Christmas. But as Filipinos tried to cope with their latest tragedy, they also saw their country plunge into its worst political crisis in years. President Benigno Simeon Aquino III has virtually taken over Congress, and is now trying to remove the Chief Justice in his effort to subjugate the Supreme Court.

The President has openly attacked the 15-member High Court, defied its orders, and bulldozed 188 of the 285 members of the House of Representatives into impeaching Chief Justice Renato Corona, even without a verified complaint. He also threatens to impeach the other justices. He is now trying to pull in the normally independent Senate, which will try the impeachment case.

What is happening is the exact opposite of the Arab spring, which has replaced dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and is now about to do the same in Syria. Aquino has put himself at odds with the Constitution, which his late mother Cory Aquino promulgated in 1987, and turned against his parents’ legacy, which was the sole basis of his running in the 2010 presidential elections.

Aquino’s father, former Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., was assassinated at the Manila international airport in 1983 as he returned from the US to resume his fight against the Marcos regime. Cory presided over the democratic transition that followed Marcos’ ouster during the “people power” uprising of February 1986.

The only institutions that now stand in Aquino’s way are the 24-strong Senate, and possibly the Catholic Church, which has condemned Aquino’s proposed population control legislation but has not weighed in on the current conflict. Virtually the entire legal profession is aghast at the turn of events. But part of the mainstream media and the propaganda pollsters appear to have been coopted by Aquino’s apologists. The United States and the country’s other democratic allies, all supporters of the Arab spring, have not said one word about Aquino’s shift to one-man rule.

The impeachment trial is scheduled to commence soon, but there may be no trial at all. A former president of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines has asked the Supreme Court to restrain the Senate from hearing the complaint, for being null and void. In their rush to please Aquino, the congressmen failed to come up with a verified complaint, and produced an unverified one instead. The complaint is void, on its face. Corona himself has asked the Senate to dismiss the complaint on the same and other substantive grounds.

What happens now if and when the Court or the Senate declares the complaint null and void? Would Aquino respect it? He should, but then he may not. Should that happen, he could plunge the country into so grave a crisis that the only possible outcome would be to either abolish the Constitution or remove the President. Passive or active resistance could then ensue, but Aquino could use the military and the police to crush any protest.

A lot depends on what the US says or does. Marcos stayed in power for 20 years with US support; he was taken out of power with US support. Aquino undoubtedly enjoys the same support. If the Dec. 23, 2011 issue of the US-based Executive Intelligence Review is to be believed, US President Obama’s search for Asian allies to support his “Ring around China” policy has yielded only two enthusiastic supporters: President Aquino and Nobuteru Ishihara, secretary general of LDP of Japan.

This could explain why Aquino seems so confident and secure in his drift toward dictatorship. Still the US must decide whether in trying to maintain its position as the first power in the Asia Pacific, its best interests lie in protecting the genuine democratic aspirations of peoples or in propping up the personality or ambition of their authoritarian leaders.

[1] The writer served as a Cabinet member for ten years and a senator for nine years. He was Senate Majority Leader of the Philippine Senate during the Estrada impeachment trial in 2000-2001. His book, A Nation on Fire: The Unmaking of Joseph Ejercito Estrada and the Remaking of Democracy in the Philippines, is a full documentation of Estrada’s trial and ouster in 2001.

THE CRISIS OF THE PRESIDENCY

2011-12-27T22:36:00.000+08:00

By Francisco S. Tatad[1]

At the call of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III, 188 members of the House of Representatives, which has the exclusive power to initiate impeachment cases, have impeached Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona without reading the Articles of Impeachment, and without a committee hearing or a floor debate.

At first Malacanang tried to deny its involvement. But a Malacanang ally quickly disabused the public by saying the impeachment complaint was drafted at the Palace. And the President, who likes to be called Pinoy, formally thanked the congressmen for their “help.”

In urging the congressmen to sign an unread document in exchange for certain tangible gifts, Pinoy may have unduly risked his public reputation for being transparently incorrupt. Critics accuse him now of having become the first corruptor of Congress.

In their view, he has made himself impeachable in the very act of impeaching the Chief Justice. He, rather than Corona, should be the one impeached for culpable violation of the Constitution, bribery, corruption, betrayal of public trust and other high crimes. He should be the one tried and removed from office.

These are strong words, but nothing more than words. Having full control of the House, Pinoy is in no danger of ever getting impeached, whatever wrong he does. But he has provoked a constitutional crisis, and strong words and strong passions are the first elements of this crisis.

The Articles of Impeachment, consisting of eight charges, are now in the Senate. The Senate has the sole power to try and decide impeachment cases. All 23 sitting senators have taken their oath to render “impartial justice.” Some of them, however, seem to take a cavalier view of the impeachment process.

They say that impeachment is nothing but a political process, to be decided on the basis of public opinion, not on the basis of the evidence. If that were the case, then the Senate should have no role in it. The case should be put to the people in a referendum, which should tell us what the “public opinion” is, so long as everyone participates and the process is not rigged.

But that is not what the Constitution says. Impeachment is a constitutional process. The Senate tries and decides all impeachment cases, on the basis of the evidence, not on the basis of party line or personal sentiment of the “judges.”

Now, a former assemblyman and former national president of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) has asked the Supreme Court to restrain the Senate from hearing the complaint, on the ground that the allegations are all null and void. Atty. Vicente Millora’s petition runs into a few pages. He is the first one; others, including the IBP itself, could follow suit.

What happens then if and when the Court finds the complaint invalid? Would the President recognize and respect such a ruling, given the fact that he seems to believe he is free not to obey what the Court says? Would it not create a crisis so grave that the only possible outcome would be either to completely abolish the Constitution or to remove the President?

Should the case come to trial, Pinoy may have to move heaven and earth to make sure the Chief Justice is convicted. Can he do to the Senate what he did to the House without creating a farce? And supposing he fails, how will it all end? Nobody knows.

In 1991, Cory Aquino, Pinoy’s mother, led a big march to the Senate to pressure the senators to approve the proposed RP-US treaty extending the term of the American bases by another ten years. She thought she could count on their votes, having helped 22 of them get elected in the 1987 senatorial elections. So she sat in the gallery and watched them vote. But the ingrates voted “according to their consciences,” and the treaty lost.

Pinoy could yet repeat his mother’s experience. Should that happen, after he had put his presidency on the line, he may no longer be able to govern. He may have to resign, or else be removed by other means. I don’t want to see that happen to Pinoy.

He deserves a break. He has made enough mistakes. He must redeem himself. He must abandon his zero-sum game and rethink his course. He must choose democracy clearly and irrevocably against any form of dictatorship. And he must do so now.

Pinoy is a democratically elected president, not a revolutionary one. He must act as one. He is presiding over a deeply divided country, in a time of troubled peace, amid so many natural and man-made calamities and other worries. He should show the world he has the will and the skill to unite his people and to mitigate the humanitarian disasters no man is able to prevent.

Senator Joker Arroyo, Cory’s former Executive Secretary and hardly an adversary, chides Pinoy for assuming control of all the three branches of government without proclaiming martial law, and without any of the conditions obtaining which could otherwise justify such a proclamation. Many agree with Senator Arroyo.

In 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law all over the country, in response to the communist rebellion that threatened to take over the government. It was a legitimate response to an actual emergency. By contrast, many see Pinoy’s rush into one-man rule as an attempt to conduct the presidency as a kind of video game, of which he is reputedly a master.

But neither life nor government is a game. Not anywhere, least of all in a constitutional democracy. Would Ninoy Aquino, Pinoy’s father, have approved of it, were he alive today? It is not unfair to ask that question, since Pinoy ran on his parents’ record, lacking one of his own. The best answer that comes to mind is--- maybe yes, maybe no, no one can say.

Filipinos remember Ninoy as the opposition leader whom Marcos jailed during martial law and who was eventually assassinated in 1983 at the Manila international airport while coming home from his medical furlough in Boston. But what most Filipinos do not know is that Ninoy was a most passionate advocate of martial law.

Ninoy liked to tell his friends in the press that should he ever become president, and many thought that would happen one day, the first thing he would do was to declare martial law, exactly as Park Chung Hee did in Korea, to consolidate power and accelerate the country’s economic development. But Marcos beat him to the draw.

Now Pinoy has fulfilled, or is about to fulfill, his late father’s dream without formally proclaiming martial law or national emergency. Is Pinoy simply trying to follow his father’s vision, or is he being egged on by some power or principality?

In its Dec. 23, 2011 issue, the US-based Executive Intelligence Review reports that Ninoy has become a frontline supporter of US President Barack Obama’s “Ring around China” policy, along with Japan’s Nobuteru Ishihara, governor of Tokyo and secretary general of LDP. EIR is not the least passionate when writing about Mr. Obama, but it was light years ahead of everybody else in predicting the collapse of the US housing bubble and the euro, and the continuing meltdown of the trans-Atlantic economies.

EIR says that during Obama’s recent Asia tour, Pinoy insisted that the US denounce China as an aggressor in the South China Sea. EIR then cites Pinoy’s recent speech calling on the Armed Forces to prepare for external challenges, not just internal ones. At the same time it sees more US warships being dispatched to the area close to the Spratlys.

Is President Obama the cartilege that has stiffened Pinoy’s back and made him believe he could take over the entire government without provoking resistance or hostility? Supported by the US, Pinoy could be tempted to believe he could do anything without risking his office. After all, the Filipino poor have remained docile until now, the remnants of the communist left that were a threat to Marcos are now his allies, the elite look only after their own, and the Americans will go after any dictator anywhere, except when he is their own.

Still history is full of strongmen whom the US had coddled for years and then dumped as soon as they were no longer useful to them. Pinoy would do well to learn from their experience, including from his own father’s. Ninoy himself may have narrated his own story to his wife and children.

In 1957, during the so-called Permesta revolt in Indonesia, Ninoy undertook secret operations for the CIA, according to the book “Subversion as Foreign Policy” by Audrey Kahin and George Mc T Kahin, quoting the late Senator Jose Wright Diokno as its source.

According to that story, Ninoy set up a clandestine radio station in Indonesia for the rebels, shipped them guns from a third country, and opened up Hacienda Luisita as a training ground for the rebel pilots. But when the Americans saw they could not topple President Sukarno, they promptly pulled out without telling Ninoy, leaving him in the dark and holding the proverbial empty bag.

It is not known how that affected Ninoy’s relations with the CIA. But in 1978, when Ninoy ran from his detention cell for the interim Batasang Pambansa, then Defense Secretary (now Senate president) Juan Ponce Enrile accused him of being a CIA agent. He did not deny it. His only reply was that he worked “with the CIA”, but “not for the CIA.” And nothing more was heard about it.

Twenty-eight years after Ninoy’s assassination, and no mastermind has been identified, conspiracy theorists have started saying that NInoy was terminally ill when he came home from Boston in 1983, and had agreed to be sacrificed in a foreign intelligence operation specifically intended to bring down Marcos, make Cory president, and restore the primacy of US interests in the Philippines.

I do not buy that theory. But others may. Pinoy has to intervene. He has to unlock the mystery about his father’s death, to end all speculation, once and for all. But he must, at the outset, make an irrevocable commitment to our constitutional democracy, respect the separation of powers, act more the statesman he is supposed to be, and make his countrymen, not any power or principality, the sovereign masters in their own country.

[1] The author was Senate Majority Leader during the 2000-2001 impeachment trial of then President Joseph Ejercito Estrada. His book, A Nation on Fire: the Unmaking of Joseph Ejercito Estrada and the Remaking of Democracy in the Philippines, is by far the most authoritative documentation of the trial and ouster of Estrada.

Breaking The Grip of Population Control

2011-11-28T17:40:00.002+08:00

A talk given at Sarangani Study Center, Manila

26 November 2011

INTRODUCTION

The Reproductive Health (RH) bill has engaged us for so long, but until now the debate remains wrongly framed. We have been discussing what the proponents say the bill is all about rather than what the bill really says. It is time to set the basic premises right.

MISREPRESENTING THE BILL

The bill has been completely misrepresented to the public. Mislabeled as an RH bill, it is actually a population control bill. Its reference to the Committee on Population rather than to the Committee on Health in the House of Representatives is the closest admission by its proponents that it is, in fact, a population control measure. There is a world of difference between health and population control.

Also deliberately misstated is the true intent of the bill. Its proponents have tried to tell us that the bill simply seeks to grant everyone the “right” to practice contraception and sterilization as a method of family planning. The facts say otherwise.

Nobody’s “right” to practice contraception and sterilization, if such a right exists, has ever been curtailed. There is no law prohibiting it in the Philippines. Anyone so minded can practice it, and they are doing so mindlessly, at the prodding and pleasure of the Department of Health (DOH), Population Commission (Popcom), and local governments now joyfully pursuing the RH programs of some intrusive foreign governments.

The present budget for it is at least P2 billion, not including the money coming directly to local governments from foreign population controllers. And that accounts for the national contraceptive prevalence rate of 51 percent.

So let us not be deceived.

THE BILL’S REAL PURPOSE

What the bill really wants to do is to make birth control a necessary precondition and an essential component of marriage, and to make the State the primary and ultimate provider of contraceptives and sterilization agents.

Thus, no couple may be issued a marriage license unless they could show proof that they had received state instructions on the use of contraceptives and sterilization agents.

A BOGUS CHOICE

The RH proponents claim the bill gives everyone a choice . Indeed, there is an illusion of that, but only an illusion, nothing more. For while the bill mentions natural family planning (NFP) as an option, NFP is not a means of contraception or sterilization, but rather a way of life, a natural means of spacing birth for grave personal reasons, without resorting to contraception or sterilization.

Even so, the bill says nothing about how the government intends to promote NFP and make sure those who need it would get it. On the other hand, the bill reads like a virtual manual on how hospitals, clinics and other institutions and facilities, public and private, are to distribute contraceptives and sterilization agents as essential medicines.

THE STATE CHOOSES

But the real offence here is not just that you are given a bogus choice. The more outrageous offence is that the bill decides for you, at the outset, that you shall practice birth control as a necessary precondition and an essential component of marriage.

No longer will procreation and the rearing of children be the primary and natural purpose of marriage; contraceptive sex will now take its place.

Couples will still marry, no longer to procreate, but just to indulge in “safe sex” without any responsibility or consequence.

Thus, the maddening drive to promote gay or same-sex “marriage,” not only because it is totally unnatural but above all because it is absolutely childless.

PRESCRIBING EVIL

That is the real evil. Even in the United States, Europe and other non-communist countries where abortion is allowed, the State has simply legalized the diabolical destruction of unborn babies. But it does not quite prescribe it.

A TOTALITARIAN PRACTICE

The Nazis prescribed it within their occupied territories during World War II, but the Nuremberg military tribunal later condemned it as a crime against humanity. They did it and still do in communist countries, with the tacit support and encouragement, instead of condemnation or criticism, from the UN and the “great democracies.”

This is probably why our local communist friends in Congress and in the NGO world are among the most rabid and organized supporters of RH, even though the old party’s two warring factions---the “reaffirmists” and the “rejectionists”---cannot seem to agree on anything else.

We are neither a communist nor a totalitarian state. But if enacted into law, the RH bill will make us one or the other in practice. Indeed, the bill seeks to destroy not only the institution of the family and marriage but also the very nature and foundation of our constitutional democratic state. This has so far escaped the appreciation of the public.

DANCING AROUND THE FRINGES

Until now, we have argued to death the secondary and ancillary issues. But we have barely touched the real issue that should decide the fate of RH.

The proponents have tried to show us why we need the bill. And we have shown them why we don’t. But they have not shown us how they could transform this questionable bill into a valid and acceptable law. And we have not had enough opportunity to tell them they couldn’t.

WHAT THEY SAY

This is what they have said:

We are poor because we are too many and the population continues to explode. Eleven women out of every 100,000 are dying everyday from pregnancy and childbirth. Our environment has become unsustainable because of “population explosion” and climate change. We need the RH bill to solve all of these.

WHAT WE SAY

And this is what we have said:

On population growth. Our growth rate is down to 1.9 percent, and our total fertility rate to 2.6 children per woman of reproductive age. Our population density stands at 315 (individuals) per square km., while those of much richer Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau and Monaco run into thousands per square km.

Japan’s median age is 45 years; ours is 22. This means that when the world’s 65-year-olds and above grown twice as many as the 15-year-olds and above, or when Japan’s economy becomes almost wholly dependent on robots, we shall still be having able-bodied young men and women in our workforce.

At Halloween 2011, world population passed 7 billion. Yet serious and responsible demographers have identified depopulation, not growing population, as the next world crisis. According to the Moscow Declaration issued at the end of the Moscow Demographic Summit on June 29-30, 2011, 42 percent of the population today live in countries where the birth rate has fallen below replacement level; the demographic winter in Russia, Europe and Japan is spreading.

On maternal death. The verified number is much lower than 11 a day, and so many times more than that number are dying from cancer, heart, respiratory and pulmonary diseases, tuberculosis, diabetes, malaria, and accidents.

This is not to say we should care less about maternal deaths. We should be concerned about every single person who dies, whether she is carrying a cancer or a pregnancy, delivering a child or a contagious disease, waiting for a bus ride or a heart attack, trying to cross the poverty line or a busy street. But problems of maternal death are best addressed by providing adequate maternal and obstetrics care, not by requiring everyone to contracept or get sterilized.

Something is terribly wrong when vast resources of foreign governments, multilateral agencies, the whole NGO world the conscript media and the propaganda pollsters are used to try to cure pregnancy, which is not a disease, while vast numbers of people die from killer-diseases and are treated simply as statistics.

On the environment. The Constitution says, “The State shall protect and advance the right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with the rhythm and natural harmony of nature.” But the human body is our first and most precious environment. We cannot be talking of preserving our forests, air, lands, waters and seas while destroying our delicate human bodies every day with cancer-causing contraceptives and sterilization agents.

Summing up, our healthy and dynamic population is our most enduring resource. We need only to invest in it to ensure sustained productivity and high returns. Our present investment in it is among the lowest in the world.

BREAKING THE STALEMATE

What then is the status of the RH debate? It’s not easy to say, and I am not referring to what’s happening floor in Congress. We reject what they say, and they reject what we say, and the apparent result is an unbreakable stalemate. But the conscript media and the propaganda pollsters seem bent on breaking it in favor of the party that pays. Truth suffers in the process.

THE FINAL QUESTION

But assuming everything they have said is right, and everything we have said is wrong, can Congress now enact this bill into law? This is the only question which, in the end, carries any real meaning in this debate.

My simple answer is, Congress cannot. Why? Because Congress can pass no law that violates the Constitution, and the RH bill violates the Constitution. It is null and void ab initio.

THE UNWRITTEN LAW

Whether or not it is specifically written in the Constitution, it is not the lawful business of the State to organize, control or direct the personal and private sexual lives of its citizens. This matter involves rights intrinsic to human nature and as basic and as self-evident as man’s right to breathe. Such state intrusion violates the primacy of the human person vis-à-vis the State, and betrays a patent lack of justice.

AN UNJUST LAW

Thus, even if all the members of the two Houses of Congress, without a single exception, were to vote in favor of the bill--- a rather absurd possibility----the result would only be an unjust law. That law would simply divide the nation more deeply, but it would be a useless law. For an unjust law is no law. It cannot bind anyone. Not even in a dictatorship, much less in a democracy.

Assuming then that Congress passes the bill, the President has the duty to veto it, rather than sign it or let it lapse into law. He would render himself impeachable if he allows it to become a law, and that could be just one of the lesser problems of his presidency.

WHY UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Let us now examine its constitutionality.

We turn to Article II (Declaration of Principles and State Policies), Article III (Bill of Rights) and Article XV (The Family) of the Constitution. In Article II, Sections 11 to 16 may be initially cited, but let us just focus on what I call the core of these provisions, Section 12.

PROTECTOR OF CONCEPTION

1) Sec. 12 of Article II provides:

“The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”

Let’s concentrate on that second sentence: “It (the State) shall equally protect the life of the unborn and the life of the unborn from conception.”

Clear enough? Crystal. But for even greater clarity, let us break the sentence into two parts. The first part says, the State shall protect the life of the mother as soon as she begins conceiving. The second part says the State shall protect the life of the unborn as soon as it is conceived.

PREVENTER OF CONCEPTION TOO?

Does that provision give the State the right or duty to do anything to prevent any woman from conceiving? Does it?

It does not seem so. Otherwise, the provision would have been worded differently. The provision would have said that the State shall protect the life of the unborn from conception, provided it survives the State’s program of contraception. But that is not what it says.

The necessary implication of protecting the life of the unborn from conception is that the State cannot do anything and shall not do anything to prevent even one solitary woman from conceiving.

As protector of conception, the State cannot at the same time be the preventer or destroyer of conception. That is the principle of non-contradiction, the first principle of speculative reason.

AN IRRELEVANT QUESTION

Now, the Constitution does not say exactly when conception occurs. How then will the State know when its duty to protect the unborn begins? Upon fertilization or upon implantation? We have always known the right answer, but that question does not arise at all.

Medical science has long established that conception takes place upon fertilization. The abortion lobby, however, has come up with the ideological position that it takes place upon implantation. With that abortionists could claim that no abortion was committed if the fetus was killed before implantation.

But, at whatever point conception occurs, the State’s duty under the Constitution does not change. As protector of the life of the unborn from conception, it cannot do anything to prevent any woman from conceiving. The protector of conception cannot at the same time be the preventer and destroyer of conception. The State cannot have a program of contraception and sterilization. Full stop.

Thus, on the basis of that single line in Article II of the Constitution, the entire RH bill falls. The debate ends here.

THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION

But there is an added dimension. This has to do with the religious question.

Sec 5 of Article III (Bill of Rights) provides:

“No law shall be made respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed. No religious test shall be required for the exercise of civil or political rights.”

Section 3 (1) of Article XV (The Family) further provides:

“The State shall defend the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.’’

Now the Catholic Church condemns contraception and sterilization as intrinsically evil. It enjoins Catholics not to engage in contraception or sterilization for the good of their body and soul. That notwithstanding, the RH bill seeks to impose contraception and sterilization upon everyone, without regard to their religious convictions.

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION

Not only does the bill require Catholics to act against their own moral convictions. It also requires them to use their taxes to pay for the program that seeks to destroy those convictions. They would be made to pay for the bullets that would be used to kill them.

Religious persecution pure and simple.

The Catholics did not have to be the overwhelming religious majority to have the right to profess and practice their faith, without any discrimination from any source. That right belongs to all. And the smallest religious group with only a handful of members has as much right as the most numerous church.

Whatever our faith, we do not have to explain to Congress why we believe what we believe. We do not have to justify our conviction that contraception is intrinsically evil, even though the legislators would probably benefit if we said something about it; and there is a chance some of them might be converted. It is sufficient for the State to know that we believe what we believe and its duty would be to respect our right to believe what we believe.

The fact that some “Catholics” do not follow what the Church teaches does not give Congress the right to enact a law against any particular teaching of the Church. We do not ask Congress to act as the official enforcer of our Catholic belief. But we cannot allow Congress to disrespect or trample upon our Catholic belief or any other religious belief.

In any case, we now ask Congress and the President to recognize the fact that the RH bill is an anti-Catholic bill which they have no right to impose upon Catholics. As Catholics and as democrats, we have a right, if not a duty, to resist it, with our lives if necessary, should they ever inflict it upon our people.

WHO’S IMPOSING ON WHOM?

We are asked not to impose our Catholic belief on non-Catholics. We hear this even from well-meaning sources who should know the real score. There is no attempt to impose Catholic belief on anyone. Some non-Catholics and non-believers, however, expect Catholics to tolerate their belief or non-belief, without any effort or desire on their part to reciprocate. They construe the Catholic position against the RH bill as an assault on their “right” to practice contraception and sterilization.

This is a complete misunderstanding of the principles and the facts. Catholic rejection of RH has not prevented, and is not intended to prevent non-Catholics and non-believers from believing, if they do, that contraception and sterilization are good for their health and soul and from contracepting and getting themselves sterilized. The abandonment of the RH bill---which we hope and pray will come soon---would still not affect their “right” to contracept or get themselves sterilized.

But their insistence that Catholics practice contraception and sterilization, regardless of their moral and religious convictions, is an unprovoked, unnecessary and unacceptable attack upon the Catholic Church and its flock.

Their apparent readiness to allow the State, through the RH bill, to dictate the intimate details of their marital lives, without regard to the moral law and the Constitution, is an attack on the basic rights and freedom of all men and women, and of all religions, beginning with their own.

CATHOLICS AND NON-CATHOLICS SHOULD REJECT RH

Regardless of their conflicting beliefs on contraception and sterilization, Catholics, non-Catholics and even non-believers alike should work together against such State imposition, if they truly value their inviolable dignity as human persons.

As Catholics we have a right and a duty to make sure that in this predominantly Catholic country the government should not stamp the boot of Nazi or communist totalitarianism upon the face of the Filipino family, whatever its religion. While there is no Catholic vote in a predominantly Catholic country, we should exert every effort to put in office the best qualified Catholic candidates, whenever that is possible. And we should exert greater effort to make sure that no known anti-life and anti-family candidate should ever win again.

CONCLUSION

In the 2010 elections, we failed to wage an earnest national campaign to elect the best qualified pro-life and pro-family candidates. Some well-meaning individuals and groups even made the mistake of naively characterizing as “pro-life” certain double-dealing politicians who had no sustainable record of standing for the family and human life, and who turned out to be “anti-life” and “anti-family” as soon as they were recruited by the population controllers. We cannot afford to make that mistake again.

As we prepare for the next elections, we must go down to the grassroots and begin to organize a parish-based national movement to separate the goats from the sheep, the lackeys and hirelings of global population control from the true friends and servants of the Filipino people. That is the only way we could hope to break the iron grip of the global population controllers upon our government and our people.

No Surrender, No Compromise

2011-11-28T17:37:00.002+08:00

A speech delivered at the National “Philippines for Life” Congress

Summit Circle Hotel, Cebu City

16 November 2011

My first words will be to thank Dr. Rene Bullecer for organizing this Congress and for proposing the focus of our deliberations. And thank you all for coming to this forum.

“Surrender is not an option, Compromise is not the Solution.” That is our theme. It is the only correct position to take. That is to say, if we truly believe the sanctity of human life, marriage and the family is worth fighting for. Or even dying for.

Last October 31, according to the U.N. population count, the 7 billionth human being was born. In reality, given the poor state of our data gathering, no one can guarantee the accuracy of that claim. We may have long passed the 7 billionth mark, or we may not yet be there. Nobody knows for sure. But the U.N. bureaucrats had decided that the 7 billionth baby would arrive at Halloween, as if to make it part of the day we remember all our dead relations and friends.

So when Baby Danica arrived on Oct. 31, she became for us Filipinos the symbolic baby 7 billion. Other countries have their own symbolic 7 billionth. It wasn’t easy getting there. There were formidable obstacles. Universal contraception, sterilization, abortion, euthanasia, divorce, same-sex ‘marriage’, other means of population control---all these were (are) meant to suppress the population. It was therefore a great and godly thing that baby 7 billion came through despite the obstacles.

A few days before this event, population experts based in Moscow, Washington, DC, and London spoke to the world by skylink to suggest what 7 billion human beings mean for our planet. They concluded, among other things, that baby 7 billion would not have been possible if the world did not have so much more food, better health care, better housing, better education, greater capacity to cope with emergencies, conflicts, calamities and disasters. All of these helped people to live better and longer. And as they did, fewer people died young, and population rose, even though fewer and fewer couples continued to reproduce at or above replacement level.

Steven Mosher, President of the US-based Population Research Institute (PRI), lends us some useful statistics. In 1800, when the population stood at one billion, the worldwide per capita income was $100. Today, with 7 billion, it is $9,000. As late as the 19^th century, four out of every ten (10) children died before reaching age five. The average lifespan was under 30 years. Today, the under-five mortality is under 6 percent and falling. And the average lifespan is 69.

So why do we hear that one billion people have nothing to eat? Has not population growth finally outrstripped food production, as Thomas Malthus famously warned in 1798? Let’s not be misled. There’s enough food for all to have a daily diet of 3,500 calories each. But ethnic wars, border wars, internal conflicts, economic sanctions and embargoes, natural calamities, man-made disasters, and the lack of processing, storage and transport facilities prevent the effective and equitable distribution of food. And stupidity and greed have created so much inequality that the richest 400 Americans own more than half of what the entire American population owns.

Now hasn’t the planet grown too small for our needs? Aren’t we running out of space? It’s all media hype. In the sixties, some demographers calculated that all of humanity could be made to fit inside the state of texas. The calculation still holds, except that Dr. Igor Beloborodov, the Director of the Demographic Institute in Moscow, likes to mention Australia or Arizona instead of Texas.

While the total population has grown, the growth rate has slowed down from 2.1 percent in 1960 to 1.2 percent this year. At that rate of growth, and falling, world population is likely to shrink back to six billion by the end of the century, with another billion falling off every 20 years thereafter, into the 22^nd century. As Steven Mosher puts it, those who believe the population will continue to rise indefinitely only need to hold their breath, for by the end of the century, the population would fall below 7 billion all over again.

Depopulation or shrinking population is the real crisis staring us in the face . Africa’s one billion could treble by the end of the century, but the demographic winter in Russia, Japan and Europe could spread rapidly and irreversibly to the other continents. In at least 80 countries today, representing over half of the world’s population, the fertility rate has already fallen below 2.1 children per woman of reproductive age. Parents are no longer being replaced. Not enough young people are entering the workforce to support the retired 65 year olds and above, who will be twice as many as the 15-year-olds and younger in 40 years.

This has prompted some four hundred experts from 65 countries to convene the Moscow demographic summit on June 29-30, 2011, and consider what remedial measures to take. Having had the privilege of taking part in that summit and in framing the Moscow Declaration on the emerging demographic crisis, I now commend that same document to the attention of this Congress.

The Declaration calls on the governments of all nations and on international institutions to develop immediately a pro-family demographic policy; adopt a special international pro-family strategy and action plan; and “put an end to interference with the private life of the family under the pretext of so-called ‘family planning’, ‘protection of the rights of the child’, and ‘gender equality.’

But not everyone sees the errors we see. Far from renouncing those errors, many prefer to contribute to them instead.

For example, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon situates the arrival of baby 7 billion against the background of the Wall Street protests that have shaken official Washington and corporate America. For him, it is a grave contradiction.

The event calls for reflection rather than celebration, says Babtunde Osotimehin, Executive Director of the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), the UN’s principal agency for population control.

And the Center for Biological Diversity sees it as a curse, pure and simple. “Overpopulation and overconsumption are the root causes of environmental destruction. They’re driving the species extinct, destroying wildlife habitat, and undermining the basic needs of all life at an unprecedented rate. It has to stop,” says the US-based center.

From Thomas Malthus down to the present celebrities and icons of population control, it’s the same message the world has heard this past 200 years.

In 1968, the same year Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, his prophetic encyclical on human life, Paul Ehrlich predicted in his book Population bomb that millions would die from famine if uncontrolled population growth persisted. In 1969, he advocated adding sterilants to the food and water supply to sterilize the entire cities. In 1977, he reiterated the idea in Ecoscience, a book he co-authored with his wife Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren.

Aside from putting infertility drugs into the food or water supply for general and massive sterilization, the book talks of using an armed international police force to dictate the most intimate details of family life under a planetary regime with the power of life and death over the lives of its citizens. Forcing women to abort their pregnancies is just one of them.

As dangerous as their ideas are, the Ehrlich couple have never been in a position to officially propose population policy. But his co-author Holdren is. Holdrin is the present Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is informally known as the Science Czar of the United States, a most powerful and influential position in the Obama administration.

In 1972, Maurice Strong, a former UN functionary and World Bank advisor, advocated government licencing for women to be allowed to bear children.

In 1988, Prince Philip of Britain was quoted as saying: “In the event I am reborn, I would like to return as a deadly virus in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

The statement may have been made tongue-in-cheek for the peculiar amusement of the British elite. But it encourages sordid speculation that some pandemics like HIV/AIDS, SARS and others were invented by mad military scientists to decimate Africa’s robust population.

In January 2000, CNN’s Ted Turner was quoted as saying that “Thou shalt not commit adultery” should be deleted from the Ten Commandments. And that, “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95 percent decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

In his last interview with Le Monde two months beefore he died in 2004, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who developed the critical theory of deconstruction, proposed the abolition of marriage “in the civil and secular code” and its replacement by a purely civil union with no limitation as to the sex or number of the partners involved, and with no procreative intent.

In 1999, on the day and hour that Adnan Nevic, the UN’s symbolic 6 billionth baby, arrived to a refugee couple in Bosnia, I was speaking to the 102^nd Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Berlin. In my statement to the world parliamentarians, I wondered why the event seemed to fill the richest countries with such gloom, alarm and panic when they should be celebrating it with champagne and fireworks—like the Fetes de Geneve. Many delegates from the developing world lined up to congratulate me after my speech, but some from the developed world showed visible contempt.

Nothing has changed since.

Outside of this Congress and other friendly places, the worldwide attack on human life, on marriage and on the family continues unabated. It continues to pour in from the UN, from the multilateral financial institutions, from foreign governments, from the NGOs, from the global media, both institutional and online. Through their local proxies, these forces have tried to create a false façade of public support for a morally repugnant, scientifically skewed, constitutionally twisted and foreign dictated population control measure, deceptively marketed as a Reproductive Health (RH) bill.

The administration has prioritized this bill as though it were the solution to all of the country’s problems. Its immediate effect has been to divide the nation and sow the seeds of religious and socio-political turmoil. Congress mercifully suspended the floor debates as it went on recess before Halloween. But until the President cancels or withdraws his original instruction to his Congress allies to fast track the measure, the danger remains. Official pressure from abroad bears watching.

Two UN reports provoke serious concern. The first one, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,” seeks to nix the sovereign right of member states to prevent the legalization of abortion, and the fundamental right of individuals to freedom of thought, religion, and conscience. It seeks to endow the UN with a power it does not have--- to determine whether or not and to what extent abortion is to be legalized by member-states, without regard to their sovereign rights.

It misinterprets accepted international documents on reproductive health, ignores their avowed goal to reduce the number of abortions worldwide, and stresses instead the need for member-states to legalize abortion. It tries to create new rights in reproductive health by misstating in particular the provisions of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action.

Where Beijing says States should “consider reviewing laws containing punitive measures against women who have undergone illegal abortions,” the Report, misquoting Beijing, says, “States should consider removing punitive measures related to sexual and reproductive health.”

The Report also inveighs against the primary right and duty of parents to raise and educate their children and calls for the nixing of parental notification laws with respect to contraception and sex education for young girls.

The second report, the “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders,” seeks to expand women’s rights far beyond those agreed upon in consensus documents and enable human rights defenders to define new rights as they see fit, instead of simply defending well-established rights that flow from our innate human dignity.

Unless these reports are rejected, they are bound to impose new pressure upon Congress to ram through the extremely malignant and totally unacceptable bill. The world body that was seen from the very beginning as the first protector of human rights has now become the source of danger to many of these fundamental rights.

Thus far I have tried to describe to you the lay of the land where the battle against the rh bill must be fought and won. It is necessary to have a complete and accurate appreciation of the terrain and the various forces at play in order to know how and where we stand, and what we need to do in order to prevail. We shall now discuss the various steps we need to take in order to send the RH bill to the archives and discourage any further effort to revive it.

The very first thing we need is a clear understanding of what we are, what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against. With such understanding, there will be no surrender and no compromise. We shall stop the enemy at the gates. Without it, we cannot say, “No surrender and no compromise;” and the enemy will pass. Total understanding of what we are, what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against is the first imperative.

Until now, we have allowed the RH advocates to frame the debate. And they have done so, to their advantage. With all due respect, we have allowed ourselves to be drawn to the peripheral issues away from the central issue of the conflict. We must now set that right.

The right and duty to reproduce is not a right and duty conferred by law or local ordinance upon the citizens of a State. It is something the Creator has bestowed upon his creatures as part of their nature. That right and duty belongs to the human person before he becomes a citizen, or even if he does not become a citizen at all. It precedes the existence of the State, and is not subject to the approval or disapproval of the local sanggunian, Congress or the President. It is not and cannot be made the subject of any regulatory statute.

This is the first thing we must understand about RH and its proponents. The bill has no place in Congress, and its authors and sponsors are acting way beyond their jurisdiction as legislators. There are areas of human activity in which the State may not intrude. Our politicians need to understand this, and because they don’t, we must make them understand it.

The bill seeks to control our lives not simply as citizens but above all as human beings. Have our legislators considered its full implications? Do they really know what they want to do to us, to the Filipino family, to the natural institution of marriage, to the divine gift of procreation and childbearing? How well do they understand the meaning of law, and their role as legislators? By what power on earth do they believe they can do what they want to do to us through this bill? Do they believe their power to legislate is an unlimited and absolute power?

The RH proponents have tried to make the country and the world believe that the issue here is whether women (and men) should be allowed to practice contraception and sterilization as a method of family planning. And they have tried to bombard us with all arguments why we should have such a legislation. It would end mass poverty, maternal mortality, environmental degradation, the impacts of climate change, and even bad governance.

We have tried to marshal every evidence to show that all their arguments are specious and false, that contraception and sterilization have not solved, and will not solve poverty, maternal death, environmental degradation, climate change or official corruption anywhere. We reject what they say, and they reject what we say, and the Frankenmedia and the Frankenpollsters try to intervene by censoring our truth and exalting their falsehood, and then trying to create a false game of numbers.

The debate continues to revolve around the fringes, away from the center. We must now focus on the heart of the bill. I have tried to point out in all my public statements that the right to practice contraception and sterilization is not the issue here. That right, if you can call it that, has never been curtailed. There is no law prohibiting it in the Philippines. Anyone so minded can practice it, and they are doing so mindlessly, with the active encouragement and support of the Department of Health, the Population Commission, and the various foreign agencies and institutions who have decided to inflict their own RH programs on the Philippines.

The national funding for contraception and sterilization has been in the General Appropriations Act since the 1970’s, when the old Constitution that was silent on the legality of this question. It has remained to this day, even after the Cory Aquino-inspired Constitution came into effect. This proclaims the sanctity of human life, the family and marriage, and therefore renders such appropriation devoid of any constitutional basis. At least P2 billion is appropriated for it in the present GAA, not counting all the funds coming from the foreign population controllers. Thanks to all this, the national contraceptive prevalence rate is now 51 percent and counting.

So whose “right” to contracept or get sterilized is being denied, curtailed or violated, because of the lack of an RH law? What law is needed to create a “right” that is already being enjoyed by all who want to exercise it?

But as we just saw, it was never the purpose of the bill to give women (and men) a “right” they already have---namely, to practice contraception and sterilization whenever and wherever they want. The purpose of the bill has always been what appears in the bill, namely, to give the State a power, a right and a duty it does not have--- namely, to violate the sanctity of the conjugal bedroom and order the married couple to practice birth control as a necessary precondition and an essential component of the marital act.

The RH proponents will tell you---But the bill allows you to choose what methods to use. Indeed, the bill gives you an illusion of that. But it is an illusion, nothing more. For while the bill mentions natural family planning as an option, natural family planning is not a means of contraception or sterilization. And nothing is said about how the government will promote natural family planning, and make sure those who need it would get it. In contrast, the bill discusses at length how contraceptives and sterilization agents are to be distributed by clinics and hospitals as essential medicines.

But the point here is not just that you are given a bogus choice. The more important point is that while you are given the illusion of choosing what type of contraceptives to use, the decision that you must use one form of contraceptives or another has already been made for you by the authors of the bill, claiming the right to speak for the State.

This is an abomination. Even in the United States, Europe and other non-communist countries where abortion is allowed, the government has simply legalized the destruction of unborn babies. That is certainly barbaric enough, but in that case the government has merely legalized what was once known a crime against humanity; it did not and does not quite prescribe it, as they did and do in communist and other totalitarian states. The Philippines is neither a communist nor a totalitarian state. But the RH bill wants to imitate the communist and totalitarian practice. No wonder the congressmen identified with both both the rejectionist and raffirmist factions of the Communist Party of the Philippines who cannot seem to agree on a single issue are one and united in supporting the RH bill.

What the bill wants to do to the Philippine constitutional democratic state, it likewise wants to do to the divine institution of marriage. Procreation, not contraception, is the primary purpose of marriage. For which reason, the sexual act is licit only within marriage. But the bill wants to do away with procreation, and make contraception a necessary precondition and an essential component of marriage. This is simply too much.

This alone is sufficient for us to tell our pro-RH friends to cease and desist. But there is far more than this.

As Catholics, we have the right to profess and practice our faith without any discrimination from any source. We have the right to found a family in accordance with our religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood. We do not have to explain to Congress why we believe what we believe. Nor do we have to say why we believe ours is the right belief. We do not have to prove it to Congress, we may be able to do it. It is sufficient for the State to know what we believe and for it to respect that belief. Now as Catholics, our Church teaches us that contraception and sterilization are intrinsically evil. But the RH bill wants us to practice contraception and sterilization, and to use our tax money to pay for an RH program that attacks our belief.

Is this not religious persecution, and don’t we have the right, even the duty, to resist?

Some RH proponents, including some self-confessed lapsed Catholics, have tried to heckle and sneer at us for mentioning our Catholic faith or the teaching of Humanae Vitae in rejecting RH. Some of us politely obliged by putting forward eloquent and forceful arguments without quoting Scripture, the Popes or Humanae Vitae itself. They proved that even non-Catholics who had no access to the Magisterium, provided they used their practical reason to understand natural law, would see that the RH bill did not deserve their support.

But as Catholics, we should never apologize for our fidelity to the teaching of Mother Church. The RH bill is an attack on a teaching of our Catholic faith. We must vigorously respond to it and reject it as faithful Catholics should. Of course, we cannot tell the pagan, the non-Catholic, or the lapsed Catholic who says, “I am a Catholic, but I don’t follow everything the Church says,” to oppose the bill on the basis of our belief. We cannot ask Congress, and for that reason, we are not asking Congress, to act as the enforcer of our Catholic belief. But we can and we must ask Congress not to disrespect nor trample on our Catholic belief. We can tell, and we must tell the RH proponents, including His Excellency the President, that this is an anti-Catholic bill, and we shall resist it, with our lives if necessary, as Catholics.

There are some who have tried to tell us that we should not impose our Catholic belief on non-Catholics. That is a fair request---- fairly put and properly understood. But there is no attempt on the part of Catholics to impose their belief on non-Catholics. We are not trying to stop anyone who wants to contracept or get sterilized from contracepting or getting sterilized. If any religious sect or organization believes that contraception is good for one’s health or soul, our opposition to the RH bill as Catholics should not disturb them at all, for even now they are free to contracept and sterilize themselves. If and when the RH bill is finally archived---as I sincerely believe it should be archived----they would still be free to contracept and sterilize themselves. But they are the ones who want to impose their belief or non-belief on Catholics. They ask Catholics to show tolerance for their belief or non-belief, but they show complete non-tolerance for our Catholic belief.

As Catholics we have a right and a duty to make sure that in this predominantly Catholic country, no anti-Catholic edict should stamp the boot of totalitarianism on our Catholic convictions, our Catholic culture, our Catholic conscience, and the Filipino family. We must show the world that when the truth calls on us to stand for its defense, we Filipino Catholics shall stand together and march together, whatever the cost or consequence, for God, family and country.

God. Family. Country. I have spoken of God. I have spoken of country. Let me now speak of country. We are today a divided country. We have been divided by all the lies and falsehoods of our politics and the unceasing revision and reinterpretation of our history. The RH bill will plunge us into the deepest depth of national infamy. It will mean the total surrender of our sovereignty. For the RH bill is not of Filipino origin. It is dictated by foreign population controllers using many of our countrymen as proxies. Many avowedly “nationalist” politicians were happy to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Senate’s rejection of the treaty that would have extended the US bases in the Philippines for another ten years after 1992 as a “triumph of Philippine sovereignty.” A few others struck nationalist poses by questioning the open American involvement in the MILF issue as an infringement of Philippine sovereignty.

But many, if not most, if not all of them do not mind calling on their benighted followers to march behind the foreign-dictated RH bill, which seeks a new colonization of the Philippines, by taking hold not necessarily of the land but of the minds and souls of the Filipinos. And they like to be known as nationalists and patriots of our time. I ask for your prayers that these friends of ours be converted back to God, family and country, back to true Filipino patriotism and nationalism.

And I finally ask for you to pray that all our pro-RH friends in Congress, and in Malacanang, who are there to preserve and defend the Constitution, may learn to treat with greater respect the clear provisions of that Constitution. Congress can pass no law in violation of the Constitution. The President cannot sign a bill into law, or allow a bill to lapse into law, that is in violation of the Constitution. And the RH bill is patently in violation of the Constitution.

For the nth time, I shall point out---and I apologize to those who may have heard it more than once--- that the RH bill violates Section 11 to 16 of Article II, and the whole of Article XV of the Constitution. We need not go over them one by one. I shall simply focus on the core pro-life and pro-family provision. Sec. 12 of Article II provides:

“The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”

I ask you to pay attention to the second sentence: “It (the State) shall equally protect the life of the unborn and the life of the unborn from conception.”

It is crystal clear. The State shall be the protector of conception. If that is so, then the State cannot be the preventer of conception. One is opposed to the other. The State can not be the source, agent or facilitator of contraception. It is as simple as that. The debate ends there. On the basis of that single line, the entire RH bill falls. And with it falls the long ongoing RH program of DOH, Popcom and local governments.

The long lachrymose pleading of the pro-RH band must end now. They may have run out of tears trying to convince us why we need the RH bill. Why? Because we are already too many and too poor. Why? Because four to eleven pregnant women are dying everyday for lack of proper care. Why? Because we are the only Christian nation, apart from the Vatican, that does not have an RH law.

But assuming everything they have said in answer to those three “whys” is correct, and everything we have said to refute their answers is wrong, the final question has been asked: Can Congress approve the RH bill, and can President Noynoy sign it into law, or let it lapse into law, under the Constitution? The Constitution answers, no, it violates the core pro-life and pro-family provision. Game over. Congress must attend to the more important things, and the President need not risk getting impeached for violating the Constitution and dividing the nation.

But ---and there is one final but – what about the fact the Constitution does not say when conception takes place, and human life begins? The anti-RH group says conception occurs upon fertilization of the ovum, while the pro-RH group says, upon implantation. This question was obviously intended to becloud the issue, and it has indeed succeeded in that, to some extent. But we need not be confused.

The answer to “when does life begin?” has nothing whatsoever to do with the constitutional issue at hand. The simple constitutional issue here is whether or not the State, as the protector of conception, can also be the preventer of conception. Can the State also be the primary and ultimate provider of contraceptives and sterilization agents whose purpose is to prevent women, even one solitary woman, from conceiving?

If you are a congressman, senator or the President, and you say, yes, it is possible, then you are saying that black is white, what’s false is true, and there is no difference. It is the death of reason, and human civilization.

The answer to “when does life begin?” may be material when discussing abortion. Since a baby is aborted upon or after conception, the pro-abortion lobby thinks they have something to gain by insisting that conception takes place upon implantation. In so doing, they are able to claim that no abortion has taken place if the fetus is killed before implantation.

However, the most determined pro-abortion advocates have not been deterred by such distinctions. Some UN bureaucrats, human rights lawyers, juges and others---all influential and otherwise believable people---have been so bold as to claim that there is an international human right to abortion, even though no international treaty supports such claim. The assertion spreads to all, including parliamentarians, lawyers, judges and others, people who have the power to change abortion laws. Colombia changed its abortion laws based on that false claim.

To finally put an end to this notoriously false claim, a group of 31 law professors, philosophers, parliamentarians, ambassadors, human rights lawyers, and delegates to the UN General Assembly---all known experts in international law, international relations, international organizations, public health, science/medicine, and government---met in San Jose, Costa on the third week of March 2011 to draft a series of nine articles for international consumption.

These are called the San Jose Articles, and they are now part of the patrimony of the international pro-life movement. I was invited to participate in that drafting, but because a marriage in the family did not allow me to leave Manila at that time, I had to participate in collegial drafting the document online. I am one of the 32 signatories to the articles whose names I shall read later, time permitting.

These articles have been launched at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the British Parliament in London, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the World Pro-Life Congress in San Jose, Costa, and in Madrid, Spain. Mr. Chairman, I seek your leave to enter these articles and their signatories into the records of our proceedings, after which I should like to ask further leave to inform the official custodians of these Articles that they were formally launched at this National “Philippines for Life” Congress.

With your consent, may I now read:

Article 1. As a matter of scientific fact a new human life

begins at conception.

Article 2. Each human life is a continuum that begins at conception and advances in stages until death. Science gives different names to these stages, including zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent and adult. This does not change the scientific consensus that at all points of development each individual is a living member of the human species.

Article 3. From conception each unborn child is by nature a human being.

Article 4. All human beings, as members of the human family, are entitled to recognition of their inherent dignity and to protection of their inalienable human rights. This is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and other international instruments.

Article 5. There exists no right to abortion under international law, either by way of treaty obligation or under customary international law. No United Nations treaty can accurately be cited as establishing or recognizing a right to abortion.

Article 6. The Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and other treaty monitoring bodies have directed governments to change their laws on abortion. These bodies have explicitly or implicitly interpreted the treaties to which they are subject as including a right to abortion.

Treaty monitoring bodies have no authority, either under the treaties that created them or under general international law, to interpret these treaties in ways that create new state obligations or that alter the substance of the treaties.

Accordingly, any such body that interprets a treaty to include a right to abortion acts beyond its authority and contrary to its mandate. Such ultra vires acts do not create any legal obligations for state parties to the treaty, nor should states accept them as contributing to the formation of new customary international law.

Article 7. Assertions by international agencies or non-governmental actors that abortion is a human right are false and should be rejected.

There is no international legal obligation to provide access to abortion based on any ground, including but not limited to health, privacy or sexual autonomy or non-discrimination.

Article 8. Under basic principles of treaty interpretation in international law, consistent with the obligations of good faith and pacta sunt servanda, and in the exercise of their responsibility to defend the lives of the people, states may and should invoke treaty provisions guaranteeing the right to life as encompassing a state responsibility to protect the unborn child from abortion.

Article 9. Governments and members of society should ensure that national laws and policies protect the human right to life from conception. They should also reject and condemn pressure to adopt laws that legalize or depenalize abortion.

Treaty monitoring bodies, United Nations agencies and officers, regional and national courts, and others should desist from implicit or explicit assertions of a right to abortion based on international law.

When such false assertions are made, or pressures exerted, member states should demand accountability from the United Nations system.

Providers of development aid should not promote or fund abortions. They should not make aid conditional on a recipient’s acceptance of abortion.

International maternal and child health care funding and programs should ensure a healthy outcome of pregnancy for both mother and child and should help mothers welcome new life in all circumstances.

The original drafters and signatories of these articles are the following:

1. Lord David Alton, House of Lords, Great Britain

2. Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus

3. Giuseppe Benagiano, Professor of Gynecology, Perinatology and Chidcare—Universita “la Sapienza”, Rome, former Secretary General, International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO)

4. Hon. Javier Borrego, former Judge, European Court of Human Rights

5. Christine Boutine, former Cabinet member, France; current President, Christian Democratic Party

6. Benjamin Bull, Chief Counsel, Alliance Defense Fund

7. Hon. Martha de Casco, Member of Parliament, Honduras

8. Hon. Tom Coburn, M.D., Member, United States Senate

9. Jakob Cornides, human rights lawyer

10. Professor John Finnis, Oxford University, University of Notre Dame

11. Professor Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University; former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics

12. Professor John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy, University of St. Andrews

13. Patrick Kelly, Vice President for Public Policy, Knights of Columbus

14. Professor Elard Koch, Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile

15. Professor Santiago Legarre, Professor of Law, Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina

16. Leonardo Leo, Former Delegate, UN Human Rights Commission

17. Yuri Mantilla, Director, International Government Affairs, Focus on the Famil

18. Hon. Elizabeth Montfort, former Member, European Parliament

19. Cristobal Orrego, Professor of Jurisprudence, University of the Andes (Chile)

20. Gregor Puppinck, Executive Director, European Center for Law and Justice

21. Ambassador Grover Joseph Rees, former US Ambassador to East Timor, Special US Representative to the UN on social issues

22. Austin Ruse, President, C-FAM

23. William Saunders, Human Rights lawyer, Senior Vice President, Americans United for Life, former delegate to the UN General Assembly

24. Alan Sears, President, CEO and General Counsel, Alliance Defense Fund

25. Marie Smith, President, Parliamentary Netword for Critical Issues

26. Professor Carter Snead, Member, International Bioethics Committee, UNESCO and former U.S. Permanent Observer to the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on Bioethics, University of Notre Dame School of Law

27. Douglas Sylva, Delegate to the UN General Assembly

28. Hon. Francisco Tatad, former Majority Leader, Philippine Senate

29. Hon. Luca Volonte, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, President of the European People’s Party (PACE)

30. Lord Nicholas Windsor, Member of the Royal Family of the United Kingdom

31. Susan Yoshihara, Director, International Organizations Research Group

32. Anna Zabroska, Member, European Parliament; fomer chair, Women’s Committee of the European Parliament

Mr. Chairman, Distinguished defenders of human life, the family and marriage, may I now seek your consent to communicate to the rest of the Christian world that we have today, 16 November 2011, at this National “Philippines for Life Congress” in Cebu City, formally launched the San Jose Articles?

Thank you all very much.

Battling Global Population Control: The Philippine Experience

2011-07-03T12:28:00.002+08:00

Delivered at the Moscow Demographic Summit,
World Congress of Families
Russian State Social University, Moscow, 29 June 2011

Unless we turn it back, assuming we still can, we shall soon face the cruelest winter of our lives, without any prospect of spring.

This is the demographic winter.

The question is---Can we still turn it back, or at least keep it from spreading to our respective corners of the earth?

We pray we still can.

But quite apart from what we are seeing today in Moscow, for which we most profusely thank and commend the World Congress of Families and its Russian collaborators, the evidence suggests that the global anti-population forces are determined to see this demographic winter spread to the last village on the equator.

I speak of my country, the Philippines.

We are an archipelago of 7,107 islands. We have a population of 95 million, growing at 1.9 percent a year. A labor force of 38 million, ten million overseas workers. One million more go abroad each year. The national median age is 22.7 years, among the youngest in the world.

We have far more young people than elderly; infinitely more grandchildren than grandparents. The average family size is five, yet you find many smaller and larger families around, extended ones with three generations living together under one roof. But rarely would you find the emerging European model of four grandparents sharing one grandchild.

Our population profile would read like a perfect pyramid, with a remarkably wide base of young people that tapers off smoothly upward as the population ages and begins to fall off. Indeed, the universe is vibrant and dynamic. A demographer’s delight, a joy to behold.

But we are poor. And that’s where all the problems arise. Like many of the world’s poor, we have stopped falling off like insects, and our total number continues to rise even after the birth rate has fallen to 1.9 percent. In theory, our population density stands at 317 per square km, but so many places are virtually uninhabited, and the major cities are among the world’s most crowded. Thus maldistribution, rather than oversize, is the problem.

But that is not how the population controllers see us. Once in Strasbourg, a distinguished member of the European Parliament chided me about all those Filipinos. Why so many? I said it was still a blessing that Filipinos continued to produce Filipinos, while many European countries could only receive migrants. But to them, the prospect of 150 million or so mostly poor Filipinos surviving modern plagues, natural calamities and bad government by 2050 is simply absurd. So they have targetted us for an intensive population reduction program.

This began sometime ago, when the first alarm was raised about the population bomb, before the 1974 Kissinger report saw the problem posed by the poor countries’ continued population growth to America’s strategic interests, and launched the global policy response to it. But not even that policy found it necessary to prescribe zero or negative population growth. All that has now changed.

Through a population cum reproductive health bill that has already divided our country, the usual foreign governments and funding agencies, multilateral institutions and foreign-funded NGOs are aggressively pressuring Congress to require all Filipino couples to practice birth control as an integral part of marriage, and to make the State the primary preventer of pregnancy. And not a few Filipino politicians are eager to lend themselves to this initiative.

The bill is publicly marketed as a necessary measure to guarantee women’s “right” to family planning. But it is a complete fraud. As no law prohibits it, everyone is free to contracept and get sterilized, and the national contraceptive prevalence rate now stands at 51 percent.

Since the seventies, the government has been doing population control, at the behest of external forces. A part of the national budget is appropriated for it year after year; at least two billion pesos is alloted for it this year. In addition, in the last few years, many cities and provinces have signed up with foreign governments and funding agencies to take their programs to the most innocent villages.

Assuming these programs could stand constitutional challenge, which is highly unlikely, they render the proposed law completely unnecessary and superfluous. Still the bill is being fast tracked ahead of any proposed legislation as though it were the most highly awaited solution to the country’s most pressing national problems, which are too numerous to enumerate.

The President has vowed to sign the bill into law, even before it has hurdled Congress, despite the deep resentment it has already caused, especially among the nation’s overwhelmingly Catholic majority, who believe the State has no business organizing the private lives of its citizens, especially their intimate marital and family lives.

In a moment of unguarded exuberance, the President has declared he is ready to get “excommunicated” for wanting to require the state to provide the public with birth control methods, which the Church condemns as intrinsically evil. The laws of the Church do not provide for the excommunication of a doctrinally-challenged president, but we continue to hope that the President does not make himself impeachable by culpably violating the Constitution he has sworn to protect and uphold.

The Philippine Constitution proclaims the family as “the foundation of the nation,” and marriage as “the foundation of the family”, and “an inviolable social institution.” It specifically commits the State to “protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution”, “defend the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions”, “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception”, and defend the natural and primary right and duty of parents to be the primary educators of their children.

Going against all this, the bill is patently unconstitutional, void and tyrannical. It seeks to trample on the religious belief of the overwhelming majority of the population and require them, as taxpayers, to pay for the program that assaults their religious belief. The bill seeks to destroy not only the family but also the constitutional democratic state, which then becomes a totalitarian state. Ironically the violence is coming from reputedly the purest democratic sources.

The battle has just begun. Poised against us are the most powerful global forces determined to impose upon us what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “dictatorship of relativism,” which seeks to redefine and remake our human nature and our Christian culture, and civilization. But they shall not prevail.

Guided by truth, reason, the rule of law, and the common good, our people remain firm in their right and duty to be faithful to God and sovereign in their own country, even if their political leaders should all malfunction. They will oppose any unjust law that seeks to trample upon their fundamental human rights, their consciences, their culture, and their Constitution.

The RH Swindle 2

2011-05-31T23:14:00.003+08:00

Editor's Note: This is a shorter version of the previous post, "The RH Swindle."

So many of our congressmen seem inclined to support the Reproductive Health (RH) bill, without regard to the Constitution, the religious beliefs, moral convictions and customs of their own people. They seem undisturbed that its passage could further divide our already divided nation.

They try to justify their stand by talking about every tangential issue, while evading the core issues, which will ultimately decide whether the bill could be enacted into a valid and enforceable law or not.

Contrary to the propaganda, the issue is not whether or not women (and men) should have “the right” to practice contraception and sterilization, and be “free” to use any method of their choice.

No law prohibits contraception or sterilization at all. Everyone is free to do it. They have been doing it since martial law, and the government and foreign donors have been funding it year after year. At least P2 billion is appropriated for RH this year. Some LGUs even have their own foreign-funded RH programs. The nation’s contraceptive prevalence rate now stands at 51 percent.

It is, therefore, one big swindle to say we need an RH law so women (and men) would have the “right” to use contraceptives, many of which are, in fact, abortifacient.

At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, it was decided that the poor countries finally assume two-thirds of the cost of their RH programs, which until then was being borne mainly by the rich countries. Those costs were estimated at $20.5 billion in 2010, and $21.7 billion in 2015.

That could be one reason for the bill. But not even the ICPD prescribed, as proposed in the bill, that all married couples practice birth control as an integral part of marriage, regardless of their religious beliefs and moral convictions.

The proponents have shied away from all the fundamental questions. For instance, does the State have the right or the duty to organize the intimate private lives of its citizens? Can Congress enact the RH bill into law, or any bill for that matter, without regard to the moral law and the Constitution?

The mandate of Sec. 12, Article II of the Constitution is clear. “The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”

They have tried to dance around this constitutional policy by asking, “when does life begin?” That would be quite relevant if we were discussing abortion. But we are not, and the only relevant question here is this: If the duty of the State is to equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception, does it also have the right or the duty to run a program of contraception and sterilization whose purpose is to prevent conception?

Put differently, can the State be simultaneously the protector and the preventer of childbearing? Clearly, it can only be one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Likewise, if parents are the natural and primary educators of their children, can the State impose, as proposed in the bill, a compulsory sex education program on schoolchildren, from Grade V until fourth year high school, without parental consent? The answer is clear.

Now, Article XV “recognizes the Filipino family as the foundation of the nation,” and marriage “as an inviolable social institution,” “the foundation of the family.” It “shall be protected by the State.” Sec. 3 provides: “The State shall defend: (1) The right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.”

This is where Catholics and the others come in. They have every right to practice their respective faiths, and the State has the duty to protect such right.

I am a Catholic. I believe, with the Church, that contraception and sterilization are intrinsically evil. I try to practice what I believe. My friend, however, is of a different faith. He believes that contraception and sterilization are good for his health. Non-passage of the bill will not impair his “right” to contracept. It will not hurt the practice of his faith. But its passage will certainly hurt mine.

I do not want the State to act as the enforcer of my Catholic faith and compel my neighbor to believe what I believe. But the State cannot tell me to support, and with my tax money too, a program that attacks my faith. I would feel religiously persecuted, and would have every right, if not duty, to resist.

I may or may not march against the law. Nor call or join any call for civil disobedience. But the law would have no moral or constitutional basis. It would simply turn the Philippines into a totalitarian state. And the government would “lose its moral authority to govern,” in the words of the CBCP in February 1986.

The RH Swindle

2011-05-31T23:14:00.001+08:00

We can all probably agree that respect for the Constitution, the moral convictions, religious beliefs, human dignity and solidarity of our people is indispensable to the health and wellbeing of the nation. And that no democratic government ever enacts a law that is certain to divide its people.

Yet never before have we seen so many Filipino politicians trying to savage that view, and further divide an already divided nation. All in the name of a foreign-dictated Reproductive Health (RH) bill.

Many of the debates, arranged or sponsored by the RH patrons and funders, have been one big swindle. Often moderated by the uninstructed and uninformed, they have tried to discuss every tangential issue, while evading the central issue that will ultimately decide whether the bill, if enacted into law, could bind anyone in conscience.

They have tried to scare us with all sorts of doomsday scenario about our birth rate of 1.9 percent, and the country’s population density of 313 per square km, which are quite healthy, without ever mentioning the plunging birth rates and the rapid ageing and dying in the developed countries, which constitute the real demographic crisis of our time.

They have tried to make us feel guilty that ten or so childbearing women are dying everyday for lack of proper obstetrics and maternal care, without showing the least concern for the far greater number of women (and men) dying everyday from cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, and other diseases, without any medical or burial assistance from government.

Not every congressman or senator has read the RH bill. And not everyone who has read it has correctly understood its whys and wherefores. They say its purpose is “to protect the right” of women (and men) to decide whether or not to practice birth control and what method/s to use. But that is not true at all. It is patently false; a gross deception.

No law prohibits contraception or sterilization. Everyone is free to contracept or get sterilized on their own. No law distinguishes abortifacients from mere contraceptives either. A woman could commit abortion while ostensibly practicing contraception only. This has been so at least for the last 35 years.

Since the 1970s, the government has been funding what it now calls RH every year. At least P2 billion this year. Additionally, some LGUs are now implementing some foreign-funded RH programs. The constitutionality of these things has yet to be ruled on. But the nation’s contraceptive prevalence rate now stands at 51 percent and counting.

So what women’s “right” to contracept are they talking about? What need is there for this RH bill? We have the global population controllers and the contraceptives and abortion providers to thank for this bill.

At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, it was decided that the poor countries should finally assume at least two-thirds of the cost of their RH programs, which until then had been borne mainly by the rich countries. This means two-thirds of $20.5 billion in 2010, and $21.7 billion in 2015, which were the cost estimates at the time. But not even the ICPD prescribed the totalitarian approach of the present bill.

The bill seeks to require all married couples to practice birth control as an integral part of marriage, regardless of their religious beliefs and moral convictions. This will revise the very nature and organic laws of marriage, an institution that precedes the State and whose primary purpose is the bearing and rearing of children.

Indeed, the bill will allow individuals to choose what method/s of birth control to use, but it wants all married couples and even unmarried individuals to be part of a state-run program of population control. It also wants to impose a mandatory sex education program on schoolchildren from Grade V until fourth year High School, without parental consent.

However, these points have been muted in the debates. The proponents have tried to dance around the real issues, and many of those against have been lured into joining the dance too. Thus we have discussed the side issues, but left untouched the central issue, namely, Does the State have the right or duty to organize the intimate private lives of its citizens? Can Congress enact the RH bill into law, or any bill for that matter, without regard to the moral law and the Constitution?

The mandate of Sec. 12, Article II of the Constitution is clear. It cannot be obscured. It needs no interpretation. “The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”

Some people, including some supposed theologians and constitutionalists, have tried to muddle this issue by asking, “when does life begin?” Is it upon “fertilization” of the egg, or upon “implantation”of the fertilized ovum? That would be quite relevant if we were discussing abortion, which we are not.

The only relevant issue here is this: If the duty of the State is to equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception, does it also have the right or the duty to run a program of contraception and sterilization whose purpose is to prevent conception and the birth of children?

Put another way, Can the State be simultaneously the protector and the preventer of childbearing? Clearly, the State can only be the one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Likewise, if parents are the natural and primary educators of their children, the State can only support, but not replace them in that role. It cannot, therefore, impose a compulsory sex education program on schoolchildren, without parental consent.

Now, Article XV “recognizes the Filipino family as the foundation of the nation,” and marriage “as an inviolable social institution,” “the foundation of the family.” It “shall be protected by the State.” Sec. 3 provides: “The State shall defend: (1) The right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.”

This is where the Catholics and other religious believers come in. They have to defend their basic human right to practice their own respective faiths. I am a Roman Catholic. I believe, with the Church, that contraception and sterilization are intrinsically evil, and I try to practice what I believe. My friend and neighbor, however, is of a different faith; he believes that contraception and sterilization are good for his health. The absence of an RH law has not impaired, and will not impair, his “right” to practice contraception and sterilization. It will not hurt the practice of his faith. But the passage of an RH law will certainly hurt mine.

I do not want the State to act as the enforcer of my Catholic faith, and compel my friend and neighbor to believe what I believe. But the State cannot tell me to abandon my belief either and support with my tax money a government program that attacks my religious belief. I would feel religiously persecuted, and I would have every right to resist.

I may or may not march against the law. I may or may not call or join any call for civil disobedience. But the so-called RH law would have no moral or constitutional basis and would not bind me or anyone else in conscience. With or without active resistance, the nation would be more deeply divided. It would turn the country into a totalitarian state. And the government would lose the moral authority to govern, in the language of the February1986 CBCP statement.

For these reasons, the House of Representatives would do well to simply archive the RH bill now, reorient and realign the present RH program and appropriation, retool the Department of Health and the Population Commission, and begin to mind our more authentic and pressing national concerns.

On The Passing of Bin Laden

2011-05-31T23:13:00.000+08:00

Until we hear the next conspiracy theory, we will have to suspend any disbelief about what US President Barack Obama has said, that Osama bin Laden, the 54-year-old leader of al-Qaeda, was killed on May 2, 2011 (not earlier) by US Navy Seals (nobody else ) in his refuge in Abbotabad, a garrison town north of Islamabad in Pakistan (nowhere else).

It is the end of Osama, though not necessarily of al-Qaeda, nor the myths it had spawned. From 1992 to 2008, al-Qaeda was reported to have staged at least 30 terrorist attacks in various parts of the world with at least 4,396 killed. A list published by The Economist (May 7, 2011) includes an explosion aboard a Philippine ferry vessel, which killed 116 passengers in February 2004, but which the public had been made to believe was pure accident. Shouldn’t Filipinos be told the whole truth about it?

Still by far the biggest incident was the September 11, 2001 attack on the three skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building in Virginia, which killed approximately 3,000 people, and triggered the war on terror that made going through US immigration a real experience and got the US deeply enmeshed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unconvinced, some conspiracy theorists have dismissed the 9/11 attack as a false flag. One theory online pokes fun at how a 44-year-old former CIA asset, sitting inside a cave in Afghanistan, could have run the operation where four hijacked aircraft, piloted by 19 flight school dropouts, flew around the world’s most secure airspace for nearly two hours, unopposed by any of the 35 in-range US Air Force bases, then brought down the three skyscrapers and rammed a jet into the Pentagon building without drawing any kind of anti-aircraft fire.

Outside of 9/11, no fire of any kind had ever caused a steel-framed high-rise building to collapse, the article says. In 1988, Los Angeles’s worst fire ever destroyed several floors of the First Interstate Bank, but left the main steel structure intact. In 1991, an 18-hour fire gutted eight floors of Philadelphia’s One Meridian Plaza without damaging the granite. In 2005, Madrid’s Windsor Building burned like a torch for 20 hours, reaching temperatures of 1,400 degrees Farenheit, but it took six months after the fire to take apart the burnt structure piece by piece.

By contrast, the WTC skyscrapers, with 58 steel perimeter columns and 25 steel core columns, collapsed simultaneously at 5:20 p.m. (9/11). The third skyscraper was not even hit by a plane, the article notes.

Before 9/11, the problem was how to dismantle the twin towers floor by floor in order to remove the vast quantities of cancer-causing asbestos that had gone into the construction in the seventies. Not only did the expected cost look astronomical, the Port Authority was also prohibited from doing demotion work that would release carcinogenic asbestos dust all over New York. Despite that, Larry Silverstein made a $3.2 billion bid for the building in January 2001, then took out an insurance policy that covered everything, including terrorist attack. Since 9/11 Silverstein has collected $5 billion from nine insurance companies, the article says.

The US Navy buried bin Laden’s body at sea from the nuclear-powered carrier USS Carl Vinson and chose not to overwhelm the world with close-ups of the unarmed Osama shot in the head. They wanted to avoid anything that might rekindle terrorist passion among the surviving jihadis. The next step is to “isolate Mr. bin Laden’s savage jihad,” and “kill his dream,” writes The Economist.

In Manila, the government welcomed the USS Carl Vinson at port. President Benigno Aquino III, accompanied by the secretaries of foreign affairs, defense and finance and the chief of staff of the armed forces, toured the aircraft carrier while it was still in the high seas. Apparently the presidential party and their hosts had fun on board, but nobody else.

Some academics worry that the presidential tour and the ship’s portcall could be viewed as a provocation, which could invite a terrorist response. Given our raging Islamic insurgency in the South, and the possibility that bin Laden might still have a few sympathizers out there, it is not clear what kind of political math was used to show that these things were in the national interest.

For reasons of protocol alone, that presidential tour should not have taken place at all. The aircraft carrier and the cargo plane that took the presidential party to the carrier were both extensions of US territory, and it is not right for the president of a sovereign country, who is not on a US state or official visit, to be there. Any junior DFA officer knew that. Moreover, USS Carl Vinson is a nuclear-powered, possibly nuclear-armed vessel, if not a nuclear weapon itself. And “the Philippines, consistent with the national interest, adopts and pursues a policy of freedom from nuclear weapons in its territory,” according to Section 8, Article II of the Constitution.

These incidents could have created quite a storm in the days of Senators Claro M. Recto, Lorenzo Tanada, Jose Wright Diokno, and even Benigno Aquino Jr. Luckily for President Noynoy, the Senate foreign relations committee and the usual pundits seem completely at sea on the subject, and the sloganeering “nationalists” are just too busy trying to inflict a toxic reproductive health (RH) agenda upon the country at the behest of their foreign patrons and the global suppliers of contraceptives, sterilization agents, and abortion services.

Clustering The Cabinet

2011-05-31T23:11:00.000+08:00

On May 13, President Noynoy Aquino issued Executive Order No. 43, “Pursuing Our Social Contract with the Filipino People Through the Reorganization of the Cabinet Clusters.” The Cabinet needs to be organized thematically into smaller groups, or clusters, to achieve “efficiency, effectiveness and focus,” the EO says.

There are five clusters: Good Governance and Anti-Corruption, chaired by the President; Human Development and Poverty Reduction, chaired by the Department of Social Welfare and Development Secretary; Economic Development, chaired by the Finance Secretary; Security, Justice and Peace, chaired by the Executive Secretary; and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation, chaired by the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources.

The idea is laudable. Clustering will allow Departments with the same or closely related concerns to work closely together in-between Cabinet meetings, which should take place regularly once a week, as in most governments. There is the danger, though, that the clusters could try to replace the Cabinet itself, and do away with the regular Cabinet meetings. This should not happen. The Cabinet should always function in full, under the control of the President.

Making the President chair one cluster, no matter how important that cluster may be, effectively downgrades the President to the position of a mere Cabinet member. It effectively reduces the Cabinet to that one cluster chaired by the President or raises that particular cluster to the level of the entire Cabinet, at the expense of the other clusters. That can and should be avoided.

Each cluster should be chaired by the Cabinet member with immediate jurisdiction over the cluster’s primary area of responsibility. Its members should be ranked according to their respective jurisdictions and the Order of Precedence followed when listing Cabinet members. This seemingly unimportant detail is not trivial at all.

For instance, the Secretary of Justice and the Secretary of Finance should have precedence over the Budget Secretary in the listing of members of the Good Governance and Anti-Corruption Cluster. Likewise, the Secretaries of Agriculture, Energy, Science and Technology and Tourism, given their inherent responsibilities, should have due precedence in the Economic Development Cluster.

The DSWD Secretary may have a broader responsibility than the Chair of Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) for Human Development and Poverty Reduction, given her control of, among other things, the P21.9 billion conditional cash transfer, which is supposed to be an anti-poverty fund.

But since the HUDCC Chair happens to be the Vice President --- the second highest ranking official of the country and the only nationally elected official sitting in the Cabinet---he cannot be made to sit under the DSWD Chair without doing offense to the dignity of the State. The DSWD Secretary could co-chair the cluster of the Vice President.

The Security, Justice and Peace Cluster has, as its primary responsibility, “the protection of our national territory and boundaries.” This should be chaired by the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, possibly with the Secretary of National Defense as co-chair.

The Executive Secretary performs a highly critical function for the President. He should be represented in all clusters so that he could monitor, coordinate and digest all developments for the President, without having to wait for the regular Cabinet meeting, which should never be dispensed with at all.

A particular Department or Cluster may take the lead in proposing or implementing a particular course of action on any given question. But a Cabinet decision is always made by the Cabinet in formal Cabinet meetings. A government can repeal or rewrite this process only at its own peril.

Remembering Blessed John Paul II

2011-05-11T00:41:00.000+08:00

Rome--Undaunted by forecasts of foul weather, the mammoth crowd of all nations filled St. Peter’s Square all the way down to the street above the Tiber on May 1, for the beatification of Pope John Paul II. They came prepared for a heavy downpour, but not a drop of rain fell as Pope Benedict XVI beatified his immediate predecessor, who died on April 2, 2005 after a long pontificate of nearly 27 years.

Many saw it as yet another sign from the new blessed who, as the 263^rd successor to Peter, had tried to spread so much faith, hope and love to billions of people. Most of the pilgrims had come from Poland, where the new blessed was born as Karol Josef Wojtyla on May 18, 1920, and had served the Church until he became pope on October 16, 1978. But each of the 104 countries he had visited as pope was assuredly represented in the Square.

From the pope’s death to his beatification, it was by far the fastest such process in modern history. It took but six years and 27 days, surpassing by 17 days that of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta who died on September 9, 1997 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II himself on October 19, 2003. But counted from the start of the process (1999) to the beatification itself, Mother Teresa holds the fastest record of only four years.

Pope John Paul II had helped to make that possible by waiving (in 1999) the usual five-year waiting period after the holy person’s death before the process could begin. Pope Benedict XVI did the same thing for his predecessor by waiving the five-year waiting period, 26 days after his death. Then Camillio Cardinal Ruini, vicar general of the Diocese of Rome, formally opened the process on June 28, 2005.

The speed of the process seemed to correspond to the strong public clamor of “santo subito” (sainthood immediately) heard during the wake and funeral mass at St. Peter’s Square in 2005. But it would not have been possible if John Paul II had not lived the Christian virtues in a heroic way, and if at least one miracle, in this case the inexplicable cure of the French nun Marie Simon-Pierre Normand of Parkinson’s disease, had not been attributed to his intercession. In any case, so many people had long regarded him as a saint even before his death.

Throughout the celebration, the crowd was asked to avoid applause and flag-waving and observe prayerful silence. But people literally choked with emotion and broke into tears as the Holy Father pronounced the words of beatification and the Blessed’s giant portrait was unveiled above him.

At least 16 heads of state and 87 official delegations were reported to have attended. Even Zimbabwe’s highly controversial President Robert Mugabe came, just as he did in 2005 when he, like then Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and so many others, attended John Paul II’s funeral. But this time there was no high-level state representation from the Philippines, which the late Pontiff had visited twice, in 1981 and in 1995.

Philippine church participation was led by Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales and Cebu’s Archbishop Emeritus Ricardo Cardinal Vidal who both concelebrated the Mass with Pope Benedict XVI. They were joined by Archbishop Emeritus of Zamboanga Carmelo Morelos, Archbishop of San Fernando, Pampanga Paciano Aniceto, Archbishop Fernando Capalla of Davao, Archbishop Ramon Arguelles of Lipa, Batangas, Bishop Emeritus of Daet Benjamin Almoneda, Bishop Manolo de los Santos of Virac, and Bishop Antonio Tobias of Novaliches, and numerous priests.

At a press conference organized by the Pontificio Collegio Filippino (PCF) rector Father Gregory Gaston on May 2, Cardinal Rosales spoke of the impact of the beatification on the Philippines. Together with Bishop Almoneda, and Father Vicente Cajilig, O.P., a consultant of the Federation of Asian Bishop’s Conference, I was asked to join, and contribute my layman’s perspective on the beatification.

I have the most beautiful personal memories of that great Pope. With my wife, I had the privilege of meeting him at least ten times, and kneeling for over an hour near his catafalque inside St. Peter’s before his funeral. But what moves me most is his life of holiness as Servant of the servants of God, the work he did and the suffering he bore to prepare the Church for the third millennium.

Through his 14 encyclicals, 15 apostolic exhortations, 11 apostolic constitutions, 45 apostolic letters, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the reforms of the Eastern and Western Codes of Canon Law and of the Roman Curia, his personal writings, his pastoral visits to 104 countries and to 146 places in Italy, not to mention the 317 of his 333 parishes in Rome, his bold thrust at dialogue with the other religions, and above all his personal witness, he gave us, in Pope Benedict XVI’s words, the strength to believe in---and to be one with---Christ.

In Tertio Millennio Aveniente (1994) and Novo Millennio Ineunte, he anticipated to us the manifold challenges and opportunities of the new millennium.

As the pope for human life, marriage, the family, women and the youth, he labored tirelessly to promote the culture of life, breaking new ground in Evangelium Vitae, Veritatis Splendor, Familaris Consortio, Magnum Matrimonii Sacramentum, Mulieris Dignitatem, his World Meetings of Families and World Youth Days.

He elaborated on the real meaning and value of labor in Laborem Exercens in a way no progressive mind had done before him or since. He enlarged our vision of our social concerns in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Centesimus Annus and related utterances and writings.

He deepened the laity’s understanding of their role in the Church in Christifideles Laici; and that of the clergy and the religious in Fidei Depositum, Pastor Bonus, Pastores Gregis, Vita Consecrata, Pastores Dabo Vobis, Misericordia Dei, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

He foresaw the moral relativism that would engulf our materialistic global society, and set the standards by which faith and reason should deal with each other in Fides et Ratio, a theme which Pope Benedict XVI has since carried forward with his eloquent call for the mutual purification of faith and reason.

Many Filipinos recall with profound gratitude that Blessed John Paul II created the first Filipino saint, St. Lorenzo Ruiz, in 1987, and beatified Pedro Calungsod in 2000. He also created two outstanding Filipino cardinals---Ricardo J. Cardinal Vidal, now Archbishop Emeritus of Cebu, and Jose T. Cardinal Sanchez, former Secretary of the Congregation of the Evangelization of Peoples, and now Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Clergy----the first and so far only Filipino cleric ever to head a dicastery of the Roman Curia. At 91, the cardinal has given up his Vatican residence and offered to do whatever he can to help strengthen the pastoral life of the Church in the Philippines.

My own undimmed memory of the new blessed is that of the immaculately garbed pilgrim pope kissing the ground at the Manila international airport and greeting the Filipinos in his rich booming voice, “I come in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose servant I am.” And then proclaiming to the biggest human assembly ever gathered on earth, up to that time, that “you are the light of Asia and the world!”

It would seem to me an utter lack of gratitude if we fail to make that light burn as brightly as it should, in the face of the savage threat to extinguish it from the reproductive forces of darkness.

The Making of an Unjust Law

2011-02-17T23:41:00.000+08:00

1. Six bills in the House of Representatives---HB Nos. 96, 101, 513, 1160, 1520 & 3387---half of them titled, An Act Providing For A National Policy on Reproductive Health, Responsible Parenthood And Population And Development and For Other Purposes, have been consolidated by the House Committee on Population and Family Relations into a substitute bill titled, An Act Providing For A Comprehensive Policy On Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health, And Population And Development, And For Other Purposes. The bill will shortly be reported out by the Committee on Second Reading for floor debates.

2. Is it a different bill? Less objectionable? Does it stand on firmer constitutional and legal ground?

No, it is the same dog with a different collar. Although dressed a little differently, it is just as constitutionally infirm and dangerous as the original.

3. Let me show it.

a) Sec. 2 -- Declaration of Policy provides: “The State recognizes and guarantees the universal basic human right to reproductive health by all
persons, particularly of parents, couples and women, consistent with
their religious convictions, cultural beliefs and the demands of
responsible parenthood. Toward this end, there shall be no
discrimination against any person on grounds such as sex, age, religion,
sexual orientation, disabilities, political affiliation and ethnicity.”

This is misleading, to say the least. For while there ought to be a basic human right to reproductive health, properly understood, there cannot be a universal right to reproductive health, given the way “reproductive health”is defined in the bill, and the wide public official articulation by some international actors (pace US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and WHO) to the effect that “reproductive health includes access to abortion.”

And while the Declaration speaks of the “human right to reproductive health by all persons, consistent with their religious convictions, cultural beliefs and the demands of responsible parenthood,” the bill requires the members of the most numerous Church -–the Catholics-- who reject contraception and sterilization as intrinsically evil, to support with their tax money the promotion of the same intrinsic evil. There can be no more patent and violent act of discrimination.

b) Sec. 3 -- “Guiding Principles”—provides: “(a) Freedom of choice, which is central to the exercise of the right, must be fully guaranteed by the State.” There is nothing wrong with that statement, except that putting it there is superfluous, since no law prohibits anyone from exercising such “freedom;” the Department of Health (DOH) and the Population Commission (POPCOM) have been running a reproductive health program since the early 70s, in violation of the prolife, post-Marcos Constitution since President Corazon Aquino promulgated it in 1987; women and men are freely contracepting and getting sterilized; and the contraceptive prevalence rate is already 51 percent and counting.

c) There is an unremitting effort to make it appear that the main purpose and thrust of the bill is to guarantee everyone’s “human right of reproductive health.” That is how the public debate on the RH bill has been framed from the very beginning. But it is deceptive and misleading. That “right” is unthreatened and undisturbed; everyone is “free” to contracept or get sterilized.

THE REAL PURPOSE OF THE BILL IS TO PRESCRIBE AND PROMOTE UNIVERSAL BIRTH CONTROL FOR ALL MARRIED COUPLES THROUGH AN OFFICIAL PROGRAM FUNDED AND RUN BY THE STATE AND ALL ITS AGENCIES AND INSTRUMENTALITIES.

Thus, Section 18 provides: “No marriage license shall be issued by the Local Civil Registrar unless the applicants present a Certificate of Compliance issued for free by the Local Family Planning Office certifying that they had duly received adequate instructions and information on family planning, responsible parenthood, breastfeeding and infant nutrition.”

In paragraph three, the Declaration of Policy “guarantees universal access to medically-safe, legal, affordable, effective and quality reproductive health care services, methods, devices, supplies and relevant information and education.”

Sec. 10 provides: “Products and supplies for modern family planning methods shall be part of the National Drug Formulary and the same shall be included in the regular purchase of essential medicines and supplies of all national and local hospitals and other government health units.”

Sec. 11 provides: “The DOH shall spearhead the efficient procurement, distribution to Local Government Units (LGUs) and usage-monitoring of family planning supplies for the entire country. The DOH shall coordinate with all appropriate LGUs to plan and implement this procurement and distribution program…”

d) The bill requires the State to “promote, without bias, all effective
natural and modern methods of family planning that are medically safe
and legal.” But it fails to appreciate the fact that natural family planning is centered on the exercise of periodic continence by couples during the woman’s fertile period and does not at all involve contraception. And while the bill contains ample provisions for the procurement, acquisition and distribution of facilities and supplies for artificial methods of contraception and sterilization, it says nothing about the development, procurement, acquisition and deployment of skills for natural family planning. That renders highly suspect, if not downright fraudulent, the phrase “without bias” in the above-quoted provision. The bias is clear and unmistakable in favor of artificial methods of contraception and sterilization.

e) Sec. 3 (k) provides: “There shall be no population targets and the mitigation of the population growth rate is incidental to the promotion of reproductive health and sustainable development.”

This is another suspicious, if not downright fraudulent, statement. What population growth rate is there to mitigate? The annual population growth rate is now 1.9 percent, and declining . The total population stands at 95 million or so, not on account of a high birth rate but simply because people have stopped dying like flies. The country’s population density is 313 per square km, but urbanization has created super-congested cities like Manila with a population density of more than 43,000 per square km. For all this, the country has a younger and more dynamic workforce than that of at least 107 other countries. The median age is 22.70 years while that of most of the developed countries is in the 40’s, with Monaco on top at 45.50 years, followed by Japan and Germany at 43.50 and 43 years respectively. The real global problem is the irreversible ageing and shrinking of the population that began in Europe and is spreading to the rest of the rich countries. In the industrial West, America alone has been able to keep a healthy population growth, despite widespread abortion and contraceptives. From 1900 to 2000, the US posted a population growth rate of 270 percent as against Russia’s 4 percent. But largely because of foreign migration rather than a robust birth rate.

f) Sec. 20 provides: “The State shall assist couples, parents and individuals to achieve their desired family size within the context of responsible parenthood for sustainable development and encourage them to have two children as the ideal family size. Attaining the ideal family size is neither mandatory nor compulsory. No punitive action shall be imposed on parents having more than two children.”

What authority or competence does Congress or the State have to decide “the ideal family size?” This is a throwback to the original prescription contained in the 1974 Kissinger Report, also known as National Study Memorandum 200, intended to preserve America’s overall strategic advantage over the rest of the world. This matter should be left solely in the hands of the couple without the intervention of the State. A mere suggestion of it in any law is coercion enough, even in its subtlest form.

g) Among the proposed justifications for the bill, Sec. 3 (m) provides: “The limited resources of the country cannot be suffered to be spread so thinly to service a burgeoning multitude that makes the allocations grossly inadequate and effectively meaningless.”

Rarely, if ever, do we encounter an argumentative and polemical construction of this nature in any proposed legislation. It gives one the impression that even the crafting of laws has not been spared from the language of ideological propaganda, and that the Philippines is now a super welfare state that must provide for every want of its most assertive citizens, even though it is unable to provide for the real needs of the poor. At the same time it is a shameful admission that we have not yet heard about the human mind being the ultimate creator of wealth, and would rather have the State use its naked power to reduce the population than use our brains to produce more food, shelter, clothing, education, health care, etc. for all.

There are many ways of addressing this resource issue. The RH bill is not one of them. If only official corruption in all branches and layers of government were at least halved, all crooks jailed and their ill-gotten wealth recovered and used wisely by the State; if only the irresponsible automatic servicing of the country’s long overpaid loans were prudently reexamined and rationalized, and the priorities of the physical economy given the proper attention they deserve, there would be more than enough money for all the necessary social services, and we wont have to beg for doleouts from donor governments and institutions whose primary interest is to paganize our Christian civilization and promote the anti-culture of death.

4. Why is the RH bill constitutionally infirm and dangerous?

a) The bill seeks to legislate a moral evil into the lives of Filipinos. Contraception and sterilization are, at the very least, offenses against chastity, which is a universal human virtue, not just a virtue for Catholics. Contraception and sterilization not only promote promiscuity; they also render continence superfluous and put the dignity of the human person, the dignity of the transmission of human life, and the human capacity to love at risk (Rhonheimer). The Nuremberg military tribunal of 1945-46 condemned the contraception, sterilization and abortion imposed by the Nazis on conquered populations as a crime against humanity. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 1948 and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998 both condemn as “genocide” certain “measures to prevent births within a group.” So it is one thing for private individuals today to contracept or get themselves sterilized, but quite another for the non-totalitarian state to prescribe or sponsor contraception or sterilization for any part of the citizenry. That would bring us closer to Nazi Germany.

b) To propose that we take a morally neutral view on contraception and sterilization is to propose that we “remove an entire area of human behavior from regulation of the moral law” (Rhonheimer), which can only have the most disastrous consequences on the morality of human acts. Granted, arguendo, that one could momentarily avoid looking at contraception and sterilization as intrinsically evil, does the State have the right or the duty to organize the private lives of its citizens and prescribe and promote contraception and sterilization as a necessary component of married life? Nothing gives the State that right or that duty; it cannot do so without turning into a totalitarian state. Even for the RH proponents that is too high a price to pay.

c) The RH bill addresses itself to every Filipino not merely as a citizen but first and above all as a human person in all his or her dignity. We must respond to it in the fullness of our being by declaring that the fundamental right and duty of married couples to beget children is not subject to the legislative jurisdiction of Congress or the police power of the State.

d) Fr. Joaquin Bernas, S.J., who had a hand in writing the present Constitution, predicts the RH bill would become law, and that it would be “the product of the exercise of police power.” We should always be grateful for the little droppings we get from our constitutional experts, but it seems to me that if the State cannot invoke its police power to order the jobless and the homeless to go back to the provinces in order to decongest our Metro Manila cities that are now among the world’s 50 most congested cities, it cannot invoke “police power” to tell married couples how to make love inside their bedroom so as not to add one more child to the 95 million Filipinos maldistributed around the country and abroad. My guess is that even our Justices of the Supreme Court see this very clearly.

e) The real constitutional issue is this. Section 12, Article II of the Constitution provides: “The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”

Some people have succeeded in confusing themselves and others too by raising the issue, when does conception take place? Upon fertilization or upon implantation? That is an important issue, especially when you are discussing abortion. But for now that is a separate issue altogether. The only relevant question is this: “If the duty of the State is to protect the life of the unborn from conception, does it have the right or the duty to run or fund a program whose purpose is to prevent even just one solitary woman from conceiving a child?”

The first principle of speculative reason is instructive: a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. The State cannot be a provider of contraceptives or sterilization agents for anyone while being the protector of the life of the unborn from conception. The RH bill therefore is null and void ab initio, insofar as this issue is concerned.

Likewise, because parents are the natural and primary educators of their children, the State cannot impose a mandatory sex education program on schoolchildren from Grade Five up to Fourth Year High School without parental consent. The State’s duty is to help and support the parents in the exercise of their right and in the discharge of their duty, but never to replace them or to preempt them.

The word from Congress is that the pro-RH bloc is determined to pass the bill into law, just because “they have the numbers.” They are apparently heartened by Fr. Bernas’s confident forecast on how the Supreme Court would respond to any petition questioning its constitutionality. I do not share that sentiment. I am convinced the measure is oppressive beyond being merely unconstitutional, insofar as the points I have raised here are concerned. I am excluding the ornamental provisions on maternal death review, midwives for skilled attendance, emergency obstetric care, mobile health care service (provided they are not used to deliver contraceptives, sterilization agents and abortifacients), all of which can be implemented as part of the regular DOH program even without any legislation.

Were all the members of Congress to vote for the bill in its present form, that vote would not produce a law that could or should bind in conscience. It would be an unjust law, which the people would have a right, if not a duty, to resist. “For the ultimate authority of the law does not derive from its being an expression of the will of party or people. Its binding force does not come from popular consent (nor is it removed by popular dissent). It comes from justice. A law does not have more authority because it is approved by many, or less because it is enacted by a few, or even by only one. A just measure ought to be obeyed---i.e. it carries authority; an unjust measure ought to be resisted ---it lacks authority---even if it is backed by a landslide majority. A just law binds as much in a democracy as in a totalitarian state; an unjust law binds in neither” (Cormac Burke, Authority and Freedom in the Church).

As Pope Benedict XVI sees it, “people will revolt against the law whenever it is perceived no longer as the expression of a justice that is at the service of all, but rather as a product of despotism, of an arrogance that is clothed in the garments of law by those who have the power to do so.” For there are things that can never be legalized, the Pope writes, some things that always remain wrong, just as there are some things that absolutely always remain legally binding, things that precede every majority decision, things that majority decisions must respect (Joseph Ratzinger, Values In A Time Of Upheaval).

It is time for every worthy member of Congress to reflect a little more deeply on the true meaning of human life, human dignity, human love, and the law, as an ordinance of reason for the common good promulgated by him who has the care of the community. And it is time for the President of the Philippines to convey to Congress and to the nation that he is prepared to defend our prolife Constitution, which is his mother’s only enduring legacy to the nation, even at the risk of denying the powerful multilateral lobby seeking the moral and intellectual recolonization of the Philippines.

STATEMENT ON THE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH BILL

2010-11-26T09:55:00.000+08:00

Given to the Committee on Population and Family Relations,
House of Representatives, 24 November 2010

FRANCISCO S. TATAD
Former Senate Majority Leader
Board Member, International Right to Life Federation, Cincinnati, Ohio;
World Youth Alliance, New York, NY

There are six bills before the Committee. Three bills bear the same title---AN ACT PROVIDING FOR A NATIONAL POLICY ON REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, RESPONSIBLE PARENTHOOD AND POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES. The other three have slightly different titles. But it may not be inaccurate to say that the six bills are six versions of the same Reproductive Health (RH) bill. To simplify matters, I shall simply speak of “the bill” as though they had been consolidated into one.

This bill continues to be described as a health bill. But while the old bill had been under the primary jurisdiction of the Health Committee, with secondary referrals, the present bill has been referred to the Population Committee, and to no other. This invites some curiousity, but it allows the public to see that this is essentially a population control bill.

The bill has two major, shall we say core, proposals, namely:

1. To make the State the official provider of contraceptives and sterilization agents to the public: these, to be distributed as essential medicines in all national and local hospitals and other government health units; and

2. To impose a mandatory sex education on all schoolchildren from Grade V to 4th year High School, without parental consent.

The proponents have given us a long litany of reasons why these proposals are being made. First, they say they want to guarantee women’s right to an “informed choice” on the use of contraceptives and sterilization agents. But that isn’t quite so. There is no law that prohibits anyone from contracepting and getting sterilized, so they are freely contracepting and getting sterilized, and the national contraceptive prevalence rate is at least 51 percent. Then there are the economic, social, demographic reasons. They may not all be bad economics, sociology or demographics. But the solution to the problems they describe is not in the bill, which could instead create worse problems than it proposes to solve.

The first problem with the bill is that it directly invades the natural, private, and inviolate sanctuary of the family, which our Constitution describes as the foundation of the nation, and which in turn is founded on the inviolable social institution of marriage. The family is the basic unit of society; it precedes both the society and the State. It has rights that do not emanate from any political authority and are far beyond the authority of the State to abridge or regulate.

The married couple’s right to bear children is not only a God-given right. It is above all a God-given duty, given to the first man at the dawn of Creation in Genesis (1:28): “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.” (I believe Congressman Manny Pacquiao, the finest world boxing champion of our time, and the only world-class celebrity in this Congress, recently referred to this in a press conference here in the House.)

But in giving man and woman the duty and “right to procreate”--- the word “reproduce” was reserved for the lower animals--- God, who sees everything before it happens, did not tell husband and wife what to do before, during and after sexual intercourse; He left that to the loving couple’s good judgment, but He left no doubt that he meant business when, while sparing Cain after the murder of Abel, he took away Onan’s life for spilling his seed instead of fully honoring his brother’s widow. Now the RH bill proposes to make contraception and sterilization an institutional component of marriage, and the State as the official and ultimate supplier of contraceptives and sterilization agents.

This raises one overarching prejudicial question, which precedes any discussion of the merits or lack thereof of the proposals being made. The question is this: Congress may pass no law abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. The government may not tell a journalist, a broadcaster or a Member of Congress what to say on anything, how to say it, and how much time to use in saying it. Does the State now have the right and authority to abridge the most fundamental right of married couples, and instruct them what to do, in the privacy of their bedrooms, before, during, and after sexual intercourse? I am sure we can all agree it does not. Now, does Congress have the right or the authority to give the State a power it does not have and which it has not been so constituted to possess?

“The Philippines is a democratic and republican state” (Art II, Sec 1, Constitution). Its powers are limited, not absolute. Those powers do not allow it to reach into the most intimate sanctuary of the private lives of its citizens. It can only does so by turning totalitarian and arrogating unto itself the power of God. So I raise the overarching question: Does the Philippine State have the right or the authority to instruct married couples what to do in the privacy of their bedrooms, before, during and after sexual intercourse? Does Congress have the right or the authority to give the State a power it does not have and which it has not been so constituted to possess?

My answer to both questions is no, and I trust the Committee and the Congress have the same answer too. Assuming their answer is in the affirmative, I now propose the next question: Can the Constitution, properly understood, lend validity to the RH proposals? What exactly do I mean?

Well, Section 12 of Article II of the Constitution provides: “The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”

The first part , which guarantees State protection for the life of the unborn, is an outright ban on abortion. It is also a ban on state-contraception and sterilization, as distinguished from contraception and sterilization with no state participation. Why so? Because the State cannot possibly protect the life of the unborn from conception while simultaneously engaged in a program of contraception and sterilization whose purpose is to prevent women from conceiving. The two actions are contradictory; they cannot co-exist at the same time; either we uphold the Constitution or welcome the totalitarian state.

But, the Constitution does not define conception, we are told. When does it happen? We say upon fertilization, others say upon implantation. That is not at issue now and we need not resolve it here. But at whatever point conception takes place----whether upon ferilization or upon implantation----the duty of the State to protect the life of the unborn is constant, it does not change. Women could contracept and get sterilized on their own and in so doing deprive the State of unborn life to protect. But the State cannot on its own engage in contraception and sterilization and say that its duty to protect the life of the unborn from conception is limited to those who will get past its program of contraception and sterilization, if any. That would be absurdity on stilts, and it could not be part of any reasonably sane constitution. That is why the State cannot be part of any such program of contraception and sterilization. If that is not clear enough, I hope we would have the time outside of this Committee hearing to demonstrate it further in the plainest, most illustrative language possible.

The same with mandatory sex education. If parents are the natural and primary educators of their children, what right has the State to impose a mandatory sex education on minor school children without parental consent? Because the parents are unable or unwilling to perform their duty? Whatever the reason, the constitutional duty of the Government is to support, not replace, the parents. State takeover of parents’ rights and duties happens only in totalitarian states, and we do not need to get there.

Finally, is there need to provide for a national policy on reproductive health, responsible parenthood and population development? Congress provides a policy on anything if and when such a policy is needed, and no such policy yet exists. Now, the term “reproductive health” is a new coinage, and is not a univocal term: WHO, the various UN agencies, the G-8 if not G-20, and especially the US Secretary of State say the term includes “access to abortion,” while the proponents of the RH bill tell us it does not include “access to abortion.” As far as that goes, we do not yet have a validly legislated “RH policy.” But we have been carrying an appropriation for RH in the General Appropriations Act (GAA) for years, and P2 billion has been appropriated for it this year. How have we been able to do so without a policy in place?

Indeed, there is a policy, and there is a program, except that both are patently unconstitutional. And there is the constitutional policy, if not policies, in Article II, and Article XV of the Constitution, related to child-bearing, parenting, youth and women, other aspects of family life, health, population development, etc. ---the very things sought to be covered by the bill, except that the term “reproductive health” is not used for the reason earlier stated.

The duty of Congress is to implement the non-self-enforcing constitutional policy with an enabling act, not replace it with a new policy which, in this case, is in direct opposition to what the Constitution provides. The RH bill cannot possibly fly, even on this lone objection alone, so long as the Constitution is not cavalierly set aside. To swamp us with sheer numbers without regard to truth and reason is simply mob rule, not lawmaking, which always begins with truth and reason for the common good.

I admire the apparent resolve to fast-track this bill. But these efforts would certainly bear good constitutional fruit if they were directed at complying with the policies spelled out in the Constitution, and by deleting the unconstitutional appropriation for RH in the present budget, and reorienting and reorganizing, if not abolishing altogether, the Population Commission.

Thank you for listening.

THE RH BILL REVISITED

2010-11-26T09:51:00.001+08:00

UPDATED 24 NOVEMBER 2010

By Francisco S. Tatad
Former Senate Majority Leader
Board Member, INTERNATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE FEDERATION
Cincinnati, Ohio
Board Member, WORLD YOUTH ALLIANCE
New York, NY

“What is good for the wolves is bad for the sheep.”
-A popular wisdom known to shepherds, sheep and wolves

Q. A paper issued jointly by Loyola School of Theology and the John J.
Carroll Institute on Church and Social Issues, and specifically attributed to Fathers Eric Genilo, S. J., John J. Carroll, S. J., and Joaquin Bernas, S.J., observes that “the polarization of Philippine society over the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill has been a source of discomfort and discontent among Filipinos. It is unfortunate that the debate has focused only on whether the Bill should be passed or rejected in its present form. Either option would not be good for Filipinos.” How do you think the debate on the bill should proceed?

A. One must commend the effort of the three Jesuits to find a ‘win-win’ solution to a difficult issue. But we probably see things a little differently. First of all, six versions of the same RH bill have been filed in the House of Representatives, fewer in the Senate. Not enough members of the Fifteenth Congress, and not enough people anywhere have read the bills or bill (let’s just say, bill.) Not enough people to polarize at this time. Polarization could come soon enough, but it is not yet there.

Quite prodigious, though, is the effort of the pro-RH media, the pro-RH pollsters and the foreign-assisted lobby to hype “the need” to enact an RH law. They put in big headlines any pro-RH soundbite, like that one we read from a visiting abortionist professor from Berkeley who said that unless we pass the RH bill, in no time at all we could become another Somalia. It doesn’t matter if the statement makes sense or not; in the case of the Berkeley professor, he must have heard the Philippines was poor because “overpopulated” ---94 million people and a population density of 313 per square kilometer in 300,000 sq. km. of real estate. But he obviously never got to find out that Somalia is wretchedly much poorer because it does not have enough people---less than 10 million Somalians to cover a country twice as big as the Philippines, and a population density of 15 Somalians per square km. Yet those who will quote anything without thinking were glad to quote him like a messenger from above..

Naturally those who oppose the bill have not been slow to respond. These include members of the Catholic clergy and the laity who see in it an attempt to use the power of the State to redefine human life, marriage and the family. If this is what the Loyola Jesuits refer to as “polarization,” then they are probably right. Except that there may be no way of avoiding it, so long as the proposal stays, given what it contains, and the way it is being promoted by its proponents, local and foreign.

What do I mean? Well, to begin with, the basic thrust of the bill has been compelety misrepresented. They have to be more truthful about it. It is not fair to ask those who oppose the bill to moderate their opposition while the unacceptable provisions, which happen to be the main, are not being withdrawn.

Q. What’s so objectionable about their presentation? Don’t they simply want to allow Filipino women to fully exercise their “human right” to make an “informed choice” on the use of contraceptives and sterilization agents? Is that not, in fact, the bill’s principal purpose and objective?

A. That’s precisely our point. It’s not the main purpose of the bill, but they want us to believe it is. Filipino women and men in great numbers are already freely contracepting and getting sterilized. No law prohibits them from doing so. The Department of Health (DOH) and the Population Commission (Popcom) have been big suppliers of contraceptives and sterilization agents, as one Secretary of Health famously boasted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. And the General Appropriations Act has been carrying regular appropriations for that purpose since the 70s. DOH and Popcom personnel as well as public and private hospital staff openly ask men and women to get sterilized, especially during a child birth. Many Local Government Units have since signed up. The country’s contraceptive prevalence rating now stands at 50 percent. And they need a law to guarantee women’s right to an “informed choice” on the use of contraceptives and sterilization agents?

Q. So what is the main objective and purpose?

A. The immediate objective, as written, is to make the State the ultimate
supplier of contraceptives and sterilization agents to the public. These are to be distributed as “essential” frontline medicines to cure human fertility, which is not a disease. The ultimate objective is population control.

The term “population control” is meticulously avoided by the population controllers for political correctness, but the truth is nothing else. The RH proponents in the House let the cat out of the bag when all versions of the bill were referred to the Committee on Population, with no secondary committee referrals, instead of the Health Committee, which had maintained primary jurisdiction over it until last year.

Population control has traveled a long way and is almost solely responsible for the “depopulation” crisis that has begun to tear at the seams of the once affluent Western societies. Through the RH bill and everything that will follow in its wake, it is determined to reshape our own society as well. It is no fairy tale.

Q. Please be more specific.

A. The original objective was to downsize the family everywhere to two
children per, by the year 2000. Where that goal has already been achieved, they are now looking at “the only child” option, even though that has already created a demographic disaster in China, with its projected preponderance of 30 million males without females by 2020. Or they are looking at the family rendered barren by contraception-sterilization-abortion or “same-sex marriage.”

The RH bill seeks to accomplish its objective through universal contraception and sterilization by the State, and mandatory sex education for school children, from Grade V up to high school, without parental consent. The bill is clearly inspired by the global population control agenda, which also provides its strongest support.

This agenda was first spelled out in U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY MEMORANDUM 200, otherwise known as the 1974 KISSINGER REPORT. It considered the overall effects of continued population growth in developing countries, not on the poverty and social conditions of those countries, but rather upon the economic and security interests of the United States. Thereafter the US launched its global program to curb population growth in developing countries. The program was quickly adopted by the other rich countries, the United Nations and its various agencies, the World Bank, the IMF, the Asian Development Bank and various international funding institutions.

In the US, population control was promoted with great fervor by the Clinton administration. But its strongest support yet has come from President Barack Obama whose first major official act was to authorize the use of US funds, disallowed by his predecessor George W. Bush, to support abortion activities in the developing countries.

Abortion became legal in the US in 1973 by virtue of the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade. Each year, abortion takes a toll of at least 46 million unborn children around the world. China accounts for 13 million, and India 11 million of the total count.

Q. Don’t they know the killing of babies is still a crime?

A. More than that. But not everyone has had the courag (again out of
political correctness), to call it by its proper name---Genocide. But both the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted on Dec. 9, 1948---one day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted---and the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court of 1998 classify as genocid, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include, but are not limited to, “deliberately inflicting on the group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

At the Nuremberg war trials of 1945-6, the Nazis’ effort “to decrease the birth rate in Nazi- occupied countries by sterilization, castration and abortion, by separating husband from wife and men from women and obstructing marriage” was condemned and punished as a “crime against humanity.” But the very same people who condemned such unspeakable horror in the last century are now promoting it as a boon to humanity in this century.

Population control unleashed radical changes in social mores and lifestyle and systematic attacks on human life, the family and marriage. As these attacks intensified, Pope John Paul II warned against the conflict between the culture of life and the culture of death. Among many Filipinos, DEATH came to be known as the lethal acronym for Divorce, Euthanasia, Abortion, Total fertility control, Homosexual practices (same-sex marriage, etc).

What seems to excite some people is the continued dynamism and robustness of our population, despite all our man-made woes. It continues to grow at 1.9 percent annually, according to the CIA World Factbook, while most other countries are posting negative growth rates. This growth rate is not high, but the real numbers continue to grow because people “finally stopped dying like flies.” The average worker in the Philippines is much younger than his counterpart in most of the world, giving us a longterm edge that has been lost forever to so many countries. Population controllers and their propagandists, however, continue to alarm us about our supposedly “exploding” numbers, without looking at the age-structure, which puts us above most of everybody else, when the world’s most serious problem is the irreversible ageing, “de-fertilization”, “depopulation” and “dechristianization” now changing the face of Europe.

Writing in the November/December 2010 issue of the prestigious US quarterly journal, Foreign Affairs, Nicholas Eberstadt, one of the world’s most respected demographers, reports that “almost all of the world’s developed countries have sub-replacement fertility, with overall birth-rates more than 20 percent below the level required for long-term population stability. But developed countries account for less than a fifth of the world’s population; the great majority of the world’s population with sub-replacement fertility in fact reside in low-income societies…Between now and 2020, the global supply of potential workers is set to grow much more slowly than in the previous two decades. According to U.S.Census Bureau projections, the absolute increase in the world’s working-age (between 15 and 64) population between 2010 and 2030 will be around 900 million people, 400 million fewer than over the past two decades. The projected average rate of global manpower growth for the coming decades is 0.9 percent per year, only half the rate for the period between 1990 and 2010… It is not alarmist to warn that there is no time to lose in recognizing---and adapting to---the enormity of the world’s unavoidable demographic challenges.”

Our situation in the Philippines is tragic and perverse. We are being asked to renounce our enormous natural demographic advantage as a great liability, and to embrace the costly and ruinous population policies of the West that have long failed.

Q. Is there anything wrong with the State or Government flooding the
country with contraceptives and sterilization agents and distributing
them free of charge to the public?

1. First of all, this is not the business of the State. It would put the State in an unnecessary contention with the Church, which condemns contraception and sterilization as evil, even though the other “religious traditions” do not. Of course the Church does not expect the State to act as the official enforcer of its teaching, but it does not expect the State either to tell the Church’s faithful not to follow the teaching of their faith. The State cannot favor one “religious tradition” against another; it has to take a neutral position, which would allow the various “religious traditions” to teach their respective doctrines, without the approval or disapproval of the State. Their followers would then be free to follow or not to follow what their respective churches teach.

This is what is happening now. Those who want to contracept and get themselves sterilized are free to do so, and are freely doing so; and those who reject contraception and sterilization as evil are not compelled to do so. The status quo is working, except for the fact that, contrary to what the public has been made to believe, the Government, for many years now, has been consistently funding an RH program and receiving donations in cash and in kind from foreign sources to promote the RH- population control agenda, in violation of the 1987 Constitution. This---rather than a new RH bill----is the real constitutional and legal issue Congress must resolve.

In opposing the bill, the Church is simply asking our legislators to respect the natural moral law, and the most basic of all human rights, related to the sanctity and inviolability of human life, marriage and the family, and never to transgress the sacred precincts of the family bedroom and tell married couples how to exercise their marital rights and duties. No government does that, except in totalitarian States. We are not yet a totalitarian State, thank God, and we must curb every totalitarian impulse latent among our political bosses.

2. Second, the Constitution, to which every law must conform, does not allow state contraception or sterilization. Where does the Constitution say that? Article II ---DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES AND STATE POLICIES---Section 12 provides, among others, that “the State shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.”

That is not just a ban on abortion. It is also a ban on State contraception and sterilization, as distinguished from contraception and sterilization without any State participation. Why so? Because the State cannot be “the protector of the life of the unborn from the moment of conception” while at the same time involved in a contraception and sterilization program whose main, if not sole, purpose is to prevent women, or even just a single woman, from conceiving a child. The two things are opposed to each other and contradictory; the result is an absurdity which all legislation abhors.

3. Third, even if the constitutional ban on state contraception and
sterilization did not exist, the Philippines is not a welfare state
and has neither the duty nor the resources to provide directly for the population’s every need or want. Were the Philippines a welfare state, provided it had not lost its core values, its first duty would have been to provide for the people’s basic needs----food, water, clothing, shelter, education, health---though not any non-essential want, which could include contraceptives. In the area of health, it could mean free medical care and hospitalization for those afflicted with the most common diseases, the leading killer diseases and occasional epidemics, before throwing money (if ever) to eradicate fertility, as though it were a dreaded pandemic. But why is no one asking the State to provide free hospitalization and medical care to all those poor women suffering from cancer, pulmonary and respiratory diseases, tuberculosis, diabetes and other killers?

4. Fourth, the latest state of research has shown that many, if not most, contraceptives are no longer merely contraceptives but actual abortifacients. They do not just prevent conception but rather prevent the initial development of pregnancy even after fertilization. They either intercept the embryo before implantation in the uterus, thus they are called interceptives, or they eliminate the newly implanted embryo altogether, thus they are called contragestives. Since abortion is a criminal offense, the government cannot be part of any program that gives out abortifacients, even if the constitutional ban on state-supplied contraceptives did not exist.

5. Fifth, precisely because State contraception and sterilization are constitutionally prohibited, even if the RH bill were passed on the vote of a “lynch-mob” majority, that would not make it constitutional nor give it the first property of a just law. As Pope Benedict XVI says, “there are things that are always wrong and can never be legalized,” just as “there are some things that absolutely always remain legally binding, things that precede every majority decision, things that majority decisions must respect.” Instead of clearing the way for the massive public distribution of contraceptives and sterilization agents as essential medicines, an unjust law could simply provoke passive or active resistance among a particular class of Filipinos. That could ultimately create worse problems for the society and the State.

Q. The opponents of the RH bill appear to ignore altogether the fact that the bill allows men and women to choose between “modern contraceptives” and the traditional method or natural family planning. Do you also reject natural family planning (NFP)?

A. The bill makes passing mention of NFP, but its real focus is on state contraception and sterilization. Nothing in the bill says NFP shall be promoted as an essential service to married couples, that medical personnel will be trained to provide the service and to train others, that every hospital and clinic and every commercial establishment, etc. will be required to have a specific number of personnel who are skilled in the Billings method or something else. In contrast, there is a detailed proposal on how the State will provide contraceptives and sterilization agents to the public. The token reference to NFP is mere icing on the cake.

But let us first clarify our terms. No parity exists between contraception and NFP. NFP is not contraception---not by a long shot. Contraception requires the use of an artificial method to prevent fertilization, which occurs when a spermatozoa successfully penetrates the ovum in the fallopian tubes. NFP on the other hand simply requires the married couple to abstain from sex during the wife’s fertile period to avoid a possible pregnancy. It does not interfere with a woman’s fertility cycle, nor attempt to render infertile a woman’s fertile period. Because it is not contraception, couples may freely use it to space child-bearing, and the State can support it, consistent with its constitutional duty “to defend the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.”

Q. How effective, and how difficult, is the successful practice of NFP?

A. Some studies in the early 90s have shown that NFP could be
effective up to 98 percent, or higher. But those studies did not
create any strong demand for NFP, simply because the method
does not give the big pharmaceutical firms or even government
bureaucrats the opportunity to make large piles of money.

Q. Aside from State contraception and sterilization, the RH bill is
proposing a mandatory age-appropriate sex education for students
from Grade V up to high school without parental consent. What is
so outrageous about that? Shouldn’t parents welcome it as a
necessary help in the education of their children?

A. The Constitution provides that the natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of their children for civic efficiency and the development of their character shall receive the support of Government. How can the State take that away from parents without becoming a totalitarian state? How could parents in turn throw away their right without submitting to totalitarianism and showing themselves to be irresponsible, unpatriotic and unfit to become parents? Compounding the sheer audacity of that proposal is the patent profanity (lapsing into occasional pornography) of the graphic images that are being piloted as instructional materials in various places as of now. They have no ethically redeeming value, are clearly destructive of the moral character and sexual composure and purity of the young.

Q. Should Catholics oppose the RH bill because it is unconstitutional
or because it goes against the teaching of the Church? What about
non-Catholics?

A. Catholics and non-Catholics should oppose the bill on
constitutional and moral grounds. Both the Constitution and the moral law must be followed at all times. Both are assaulted with equal severity by the RH bill. The moral law is not for Catholics only, and the Constitution binds all citizens. Article II of the Constitution, entitled DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES AND STATE POLICIES, and Article XV, THE FAMILY, speak of “the sanctity of human life; the family as the foundation of the nation; marriage as the foundation of the family and as an inviolable social institution; the right of spouses to found a family according to their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood; the right of the mother to bear a child and the right of the unborn child to be born; the right of parents to be the primary educators of their children; the right of youth and women to achieve their full potential as persons and as citizens; the right of the people to health and to a balanced environment in harmony with nature.”

These policies are not self-enforcing. They need an enabling
law to put flesh and bones into them. This is what the Congress should propose. Not the RH bill. For obvious reasons.

The RH bill reads: AN ACT PROVIDING FOR A NATIONAL POLICY
ON REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, RESPONSIBLE PARENTHOOD AND
POPULATION DEVELOPMENT. How does it relate to the constitutional policy or policies laid down in Article II and Article XV on procreation and childbearing, responsible parenthood and population development? It has no bearing at all.

The term “reproductive health” does not appear in our Constitution. It is a new coinage, which entered “international” usage only recently. The World Health Organization, the UN Fund for Population Activities, and the various UN agencies, as well as the US and at least G-8 seem agreed that the term includes “access to abortion.” The authors of the RH bill, on the other hand, assure us that the term does not include “access to abortion,” which remains a punishable crime.

Since the bill invokes “international law” as part of the bases of
its proposals, it seems but right that whatever “international term” is used should carry its popularly accepted international meaning. Otherwise, the bill should use univocal and unambiguous terms only, understandable to Filipinos, for whom the proposed law is written. No legal text should have one meaning for a foreign audience and another meaning for the local. The term “reproductive health” should probably be avoided altogether.

Obviously, “reproductive health” is intended to clothe in
bureaucratic Newspeak the health issues related to childbearing. If
that is so, and we detect no evidence to the contrary, then the RH
bill is seeking to introduce a policy where the Constitution has
already formulated a policy or policies. Is that permissible? Not
so, as we have seen earlier.

Q. As a Catholic, should I listen to my bishop or to my congressman
and the senators on this issue? Please enlighten me.

A. Listen to all. It is a constitutional and moral issue. So listen to
your bishop because the bill is addressed to your whole person, to
everything that you are, your body and soul, your politics, your
economic and social wellbeing, your relations with everyone in your family, and with others, your salvation above all.

Consider this: Congress can pass no law “abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.” The State cannot tell a journalist, broadcaster, or
legislator what to say on any subject, how to say it, and how much
time to take in saying it. And yet you want the State to have the right to tell a man how to have sexual intercourse with his wife?

This is a fundamental moral and meta-legal issue, which must be
clear to every adult person. So listen to your bishop. But listen to your congressman and senators, too, because it is a constitutional issue and every legislation must conform to the Constitution. You have a right to expect your congressman and senators to be familiar with the Constitution and to be faithful to it.

And because the legislators are supposed to represent the people, and you are a part of the people, make sure they listen to you, too. Above all, they have a specific duty under Section 3 (4), Article XV of the Constitution to listen to families and family associations in the planning and implementation of programs affecting them.

Would any politician dare to propose that ARMM use part of its revenue to provide pork for its predominantly Muslim and non-pork-eating population, should the region ever run short of meat? How then could they ever bring themselves to think that Catholic taxpayers could be made to fund a contraception and sterililzation program that criminally violates a doctrine of their faith?

That would be entirely unjust in a situation where Catholics were a small minority. But where they constitute the overwhelming majority, it would be more than unjust: it would be rank tyranny.

Q. The Loyola paper has something on this. Could we have your take on it? It says:

The Protection of Human Life and the Constitution

• The Church insists on protection of human life upon fertilization. The question to be answered by the State is if this is the same position it will take regarding the protection of human life.

• The Philippine Constitution says the State will protect the life of the unborn from conception. It is not specified in the Constitution, whether conception means fertilization or implantation of the embryo in the womb. The Constitutional Convention (sic) seemed to favor fertilization. The definition of conception will have a bearing on whether contraception that prevents the implantation of the embryo would be legally allowed or not. The definition of conception in the Constitution must be worked out both by medical and legal experts to determine the parameters of what reproductive services can be provided by the Bill.

Providing Reproductive Health Information and Services for a Multi-Religious Society

• Even if the majority of the population of the country are Catholics, our democratic system should ensure that public policies are not determined solely by majority vote but by all, including non-Catholics. The Compendium of Social Doctrine of the Church rejects the imposition of norms by a majority that is discriminatory of the rights of a minority. (#422)(sic) 423. “Because of its historical and cultural ties to a nation, a religious community might be given special recognition on the part of the State. Such recognition must in no way create discrimination within the civil or social order for other religious groups”; (#169):…”those responsible for government are required to interpret the common good of their country not only according to the guidelines of the majority but also according to the effective good of all the members of the community, including the minority.”

• It is the duty of the various religions to teach their faithful and form their consciences about what their religious tradition allows and prohibits with regard to family planning. It is the duty of the government to provide correct and comprehensive information on all non-abortifacient (as defined by law) family planning methods that are available. Consciences will be better equipped to make informed choices according to their religious traditions.

• Proposal: There can be two separate parallel programs for providing information and training, one for NFP and another for artificial methods of family planning (with separate budgets). The separation of the programs will ensure that NFP will get adequate funding and those trainers who wish to teach only NFP for religious reasons will not be forced to teach artificial methods. The conscience of health workers and trainers should be respected. If a Catholic health worker or trainer conscientiously objects to teaching contracepive methods, he or she shall be allowed to teach only NFP methods.

It is rather a long text, but could you please react to it?

A. We may have covered some of the points already, but just to make sure everything is clear.

• The Church holds that conception takes place upon fertilization. This is also the age-old view of the medical profession, despite some recent claim that it happens upon implantation. What is the State’s position then?

• The State’s position is as the Constitution says it. The Constitution does not say when conception takes place, but the records of the 1986 Constitutional Commission (not Convention), of which Father Bernas was a member, show that when they were debating the provision, that “the State shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception,” they agreed that conception meant fertilization. It is safe to assume that most Filipinos who had voted to ratify the 1987 Constitution before some people started talking about the implantation theory had the same position.

• But whether conception takes place upon fertilization or upon implantation is not a material issue here. At whatever point conception begins---upon fertilization or upon implantation---the duty of the State” to protect the life of the unborn from conception” does not change. Therefore, the State cannot be part of any program whose purpose is to prevent women, even a single woman, from conceiving a child. That has nothing to do with doing what the Catholics would like the State to do; it has all to do with what the Constitution bids the State to do.

• Should the government then provide the public with all the necessary information on contraceptives? If we oblige the government to do that, then we should oblige it to provide all the necessary information on all medicines for every human ailment. Now,that information is available in the market. Since the government does not manufacture any of these medicines, its more proper duty is to make sure that no harmful medicine for any kind of ailment is ever sold in the market. With respect to contraceptives, which men and women are free to use of their own accord, the government’s duty is to make sure that only those that are not illegal and are medically safe are sold in the market. Interceptives, contragestives and all sorts of abortifacients should be permitted only in the rarest of cases, when treating specific pathological disorders and diseases, upon the prescription of a duly registered medical specialist.

• Clearly, while the government cannot legally support a contraception and sterilization program, the Constitution requires it to support the practice of responsible parenthood through family planning that does not involve artificial contraception. This means NFP, which does not interfere with a woman’s fertility cycle, and is therefore not contraception at all.

Q. Are you still hopeful then that President Aquino could finally be persuaded to reconsider his announced position on the RH bill?

A. Prayerfully so. The pressure from abroad is understandably enormous, but it is a question of the Constitution and national sovereignty. The President’s duty is to defend both at all times, from all forces, including our own friends and allies. That is non-negotiable. And he still has some time to study the Constitution and the history of population control, and what it proposes to do and has already done to mankind. It is a great opportunity for conversion and transformation. Especially if he could see that the effort of the global anti-life forces to redefine the human being, the family and marriage is not a smaller matter than the travel advisories against the Philippines that seem to cause him so much anxiety these days.

Q. If what you say is true, that the RH bill is an imperialist ploy, then why is it that the usual “conservatives” are the ones opposing it, while the so-called “progressives” and “nationalists” are the ones pushing for it?

A. That is one of the great mysteries of our time. We should ask our progressive and nationalist friends why. If they are prepared to shout anti-imperialist slogans, burn the American flag to protest the rape of a Filipino woman by a drunken American sailor, and march for the expulsion of the visiting US forces in Mindanao at the slightest excuse, why are they the first ones to abuse those who oppose with conviction a bill that seeks to impose a racist and anti-poor population control policy on their unsuspecting and misinformed countrymen? Not enough nationalism and patriotism seems to be going on there. But we can’t afford to give up on anyone. We continue to pray that they’ll come around. Our greatest enemy is not malice but ignorance.

Q. The early surveys seem to indicate the pro-RH group has all the numbers, both inside and outside Congress. Is it not time to throw in the towel, or are you praying for a miracle?

A. We must pray for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to prevail. Let’s not forget that nobody can fool all the people all the time. Until the last elections, the paid pollsters and the conscript media had a good run. So many had been fooled by them. But we know, and they know we know, so I hope they’ll know when to stop. . Soon enough the truth will overtake them. So let’s not play their game. Let us instead try to get everyone to answer the following questions:

1. Do you honestly believe that any government has the right to tell any married couple what to do before, during and after marital intercourse?

2. Do you honestly believe that lawmakers and the President could simply ignore the Constitution and the natural moral law and do what the population controllers and the donor institutions are asking them to do without any cost or consequence?

3. Do you honestly believe that if they did all that, the people would simply do nothing and the government would still have any moral authority to govern?

There cannot be any two ways of reading the moral law and the Constitution. To return to the basic issue:

1) If the State is the protector of the life of the unborn from the moment of conception, it cannot run a program that will prevent women from conceiving.

2) If parents are the natural and primary educators of their chldren, the State cannot impose a mandatory sex education program on minor schoolchildren without parental consent.

3) The State cannot do all these things without abolishing the Constitution and morphing into a totalitarian order.

So it’s not just a numbers game. Legislation must begin with the truth
and justice. Even the foreign population controllers must know this,
otherwise they would just be funding and fomenting civil strife.

Q. Is there nothing good at all which the Government can do under the circumstances?

A. The best thing the Government can do is simply to follow the Constitution, uphold and safeguard the nation’s sovereignty, and protect the culture of our people. Colonialism is long over. Let us not allow ourselves to become the plaything of those who want to impose their hedonistic ideologies and flawed lifestyles upon our culture. We have so much to teach them, they have very little to teach us, outside of science and technology, which needs to be governed by ethics in any case.

The best policy the Government can adopt is the first thing known to the medical profession: DO NO HARM. NEITHER PROHIBIT NOR PROVIDE CONTRACEPTIVES TO THE PUBLIC, BUT MAKE SURE EVERYONE IS PROTECTED FROM DIRECT STERILIZATION, AND THOSE WHO ARE CONTRACEPTING ARE LIKEWISE ADEQUATELY PROTECTED FROM ANY SIDE EFFECTS OF THEIR CONTRACEPTIVES, AND FROM INTERCEPTIVES, CONTRAGESTIVES AND ABORTIFACIENTS, WHICH SHOULD ALL BE BANNED.

Q. Does it mean there is absolutely nothing worth saving in the bil? The Loyola paper says “total rejection of the bill…will not change the status quo of high rates of infant mortality, maternal deaths, and abortions.” Any comment?

A. Infant and maternal mortality needs to be adequately addressed, and
the proper medical response is known. It is not contraceptives or sterilization agents. The same with criminal abortion. In fact, the bill contains several good provisions that could be isolated from the toxic corpus of the bill and quickly implemented. These include:

• The establishment or upgrading of hospitals with adequate and qualified personnel, equipment and supplies to be able to provide emergency obstetric care. Or the establishment of one hospital for comprehensive emergency obstetric care and four hospitals for basic emergency obstetric care to serve every 500,000 population.

• The proposal that all LGUs, national and local government hospitals, and other public health units conduct an annual maternal death review in accordance with guidelines set by the DOH.

• The proposal that all serious and life threatening reproductive health conditions such as HIV and AIDS, breast and reproductive tract cancers, and obstetric complications be given maximum benefits as provided by PhilHealth programs.

• The proposal that a Mobile Health Care Service in the form of a van or other means of transportation appropriate to coastal and mountainous areas deliver legitimate health care goods and services, minus the controversial ones.

All these could be done right now with a modicum of creativity and political will. They could be made part of the ongoing health program and adequately funded, just as the present DOH-Popcom RH program has been consistently funded over the years, even if it lacks any constitutional leg to stand on. These need not be legislated at all. That they are in the RH bill is probably simply to provide an ornamental function, some window dressing, to make it appear that the bill is not toxic altogether. But the Executive, if it so desires, could implement them now, without delay, and with no legal impediment.

THE RH BILL REVISITED

2010-11-16T15:33:00.001+08:00

By Francisco S. Tatad
Former Senate Majority Leader
Board Member, INTERNATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE FEDERATION, Cincinnati, Ohio
Board Member, WORLD YOUTH ALLIANCE, New York, NY

“What is good for the wolves is bad for the sheep.”
-A popular wisdom known to shepherds, sheep and wolves

Q. Proponents and supporters of the Reproductive Health (RH) bill claim its principal objective is to allow Filipino women to fully exercise their right to make an “informed choice” on the use of contraceptives and sterilization agents. Is that, in fact, the bill’s principal objective?

A. It is not. Filipino women and men in great numbers are already freely contracepting and getting sterilized. No law prohibits them from doing so. The Department of Health and the Population Commission have been big suppliers of contraceptives and sterilization agents and the General Appropriations Act has been carrying regular appropriations for that purpose since the 70s. DOH and Popcom personnel as well as public and private hospital staff openly ask men and women to get sterilized, especially during the birth of a new child. Many Local Government Units have since joined their ranks. The country’s contraceptive prevalence rating now stands at 50 percent. It is therefore completely misleading and deceptive to say that the RH bill in both Houses of Congress is intended to help women make an “informed choice” on the use of contraceptives and sterilization agents.

The real objective and purpose of the bill as written is to make the State the principal, if not lone, provider of contraceptives and sterilization agents to the general public. These will be distributed as “essential” frontline medicines to cure human fertility, which is not yet a disease.

The unwritten, ultimate objective of the bill is population control. The term is meticulously avoided by the population controllers and their propagandists for political correctness, but the truth is nothing else. The original objective was to reduce the size of the family around the world to two children per family by the year 2000. The latest brainstorm seems to celebrate “the only child,” which has already created a demographic disaster in China, with a projected preponderance of 30 million males without females by 2020, or the totally childless “family,” which is guaranteed by “same-sex marriage.” The RH bill seeks to accomplish its objective through universal contraception and sterilization by the State, and mandatory sex education for school children, from Grade V up to high school, without parental consent.

The bill is clearly inspired by the global population control agenda, which also provides its strongest support. This agenda was first spelled out in U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY MEMORANDUM 200, otherwise known as the 1974 KISSINGER REPORT. It considered the overall effects of continued population growth in developing countries, not on the poverty and social conditions of those countries, but rather upon the economic and security interests of the United States. Thereafter the US launched its global program to curb population growth in developing countries. The program was quickly adopted by the other rich countries, the United Nations and its various agencies, the World Bank, the IMF, the Asian Development Bank and various international funding institutions.

In the US, population control was promoted with great vigor by the Clinton administration, but its strongest support yet has come from President Barack Obama whose first major official edict was to authorize the use of US funds, disallowed by his predecessor George W. Bush, to support abortion activities in the developing countries. Abortion became legal in the US in 1973 by virtue of the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade. Each year, abortion takes a toll of at least 46 million unborn children around the world. China accounts for 13 million, and India 11 million of the total count.

Not everyone has had the courage (again out of political correctness), to call it by its proper name---Genocide. But both the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted on Dec. 9, 1948---one day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted---and the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court of 1998 classify as genocid, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include, but are not limited to, “deliberately inflicting on the group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” At the Nuremberg war trials of 1945-6, the Nazis’ effort “to decrease the birth rate in Nazi- occupied countries by sterilization, castration and abortion, by separating husband from wife and men from women and obstructing marriage” was condemned and punished as a “crime against humanity.” But the very same people who condemned such unspeakable horror in the last century are now promoting it as a boon to humanity in this century.

Population control unleashed radical changes in social mores and lifestyle and systematic attacks on human life, the family and marriage.. As these attacks intensified, Pope John Paul II warned against the conflict between the culture of life and the culture of death. Among many Filipinos, DEATH came to be known as the lethal acronym for Divorce, Euthanasia, Abortion, Total fertility control, Homosexual practices (same-sex marriage, etc).

What seems to excite some people is the continued dynamism and robustness of our population, despite all our man-made woes. It continues to grow at 1.9 percent annually, according to the CIA World Factbook, while most other countries are posting negative growth rates. This growth rate is not high, but the real numbers continue to grow because people “finally stopped dying like flies.” The average worker in the Philippines is much younger than his counterpart in most of the world, giving us a longterm edge that has been lost forever to so many countries. Population controllers and their propagandists, however, continue to alarm us about our supposedly “exploding” numbers, without looking at the age-structure, which puts us above most of everybody else, when the world’s most serious problem is the irreversible ageing, “de-fertilization”, “depopulation” and “dechristianization” now changing the face of Europe.

Writing in the November/December 2010 issue of the prestigious US quarterly journal, Foreign Affairs, Nicholas Eberstadt, one of the world’s most respected demographers, reports that “almost all of the world’s developed countries have sub-replacement fertility, with overall birth-rates more than 20 percent below the level required for long-term population stability. But developed countries account for less than a fifth of the world’s population; the great majority of the world’s population with sub-replacement fertility in fact reside in low-income societies…Between now and 2020, the global supply of potential workers is set to grow much more slowly than in the previous two decades. According to U.S.Census Bureau projections, the absolute increase in the world’s working-age (between 15 and 64) population between 2010 and 2030 will be around 900 million people, 400 million fewer than over the past two decades. The projected average rate of global manpower growth for the coming decades is 0.9 percent per year, only half the rate for the period between 1990 and 2010… It is not alarmist to warn that there is no time to lose in recognizing---and adapting to---the enormity of the world’s unavoidable demographic challenges.”

Our situation in the Philippines is tragic and perverse. We are being asked to renounce our enormous natural demographic advantage as a great liability, and to embrace the costly and ruinous population policies of the West that have long failed.

Q.Is there anything wrong with the State or Government flooding the
country with contraceptives and sterilization agents and distributing them
free of charge to the public?

A. Plenty.

1. First of all, this is not the business of the State. The Catholic Church condemns contraception and sterilization as evil, while other “religious traditions” do not. Given the plurality of beliefs, the State cannot favor one and do violence to all the others, or vice versa. It cannot oblige everyone to reject contraception and sterilization, for that would favor Catholics; but it can neither oblige everyone to use contraceptives and sterilization agents, for that would favor non-Catholics. It has to take a neutral position, which would allow the various “religious traditions” to teach their respective doctrines, without the approval or disapproval of the State. Their followers would then be free to follow or not to follow what their respective churches teach.

This is what is happening now. Those who want to contracept and get themselves sterilized are free to do so, and are freely doing so; and those who reject contraception and sterilization as evil are not compelled to do so. The status quo is working, except for the fact that, contrary to what the public has been made to believe, the Government, for many years now, has been consistently funding an RH program and receiving donations in cash and in kind from foreign sources to promote the RH- population control agenda, in violation of the 1987 Constitution. This is the real constitutional and legal issue Congress must resolve.

In opposing the bill, the Church is simply asking our legislators to respect the natural moral law, and the most basic of all human rights, related to the sanctity and inviolability of human life, marriage and the family, and never to transgress the sacred precincts of the family bedroom and tell married couples how to exercise their marital rights and duties. No government does that, except in totalitarian States. We are not yet a totalitarian State, thank God, and we must curb every totalitarian impulse latent among our political bosses.

2. Second, the Constitution, to which every law must conform, does not allow state contraception or sterilization. Where does the Constitution say that? In Article II ---DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES AND STATE POLICIES---Section 12 provides, among others, that “the State shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.”

That is not just a ban on abortion. It is also a ban on State contraception and sterilization. Why so? Because the State cannot be “the protector of the life of the unborn from the moment of conception” while at the same time involved in a contraception and sterilization program whose main, if not sole, purpose is to prevent women, or even just a single woman, from conceiving a child. The two things are opposed to each other and contradictory; the result is an absurdity which all legislation abhors.

3. Third, even if the constitutional ban on state contraception and
sterilization did not exist, the Philippines is not a welfare state
and has neither the duty nor the resources to provide directly for the population’s every need or want. Were the Philippines a welfare state, provided it had not lost its core values, its first duty would have been to provide for the people’s basic needs----food, water, clothing, shelter, education, health---though not any non-essential want, which could include contraceptives. In the area of health, it could mean free medical care and hospitalization for those afflicted with the most common diseases, the leading killer diseases and occasional epidemics, before throwing money (if ever) to eradicate fertility, as though it were a dreaded pandemic.

4. Fourth, the latest state of research has shown that many, if not most, contraceptives are no longer merely contraceptives but actual abortifacients. They do not just prevent conception but rather prevent the initial development of pregnancy even after fertilization. They either intercept the embryo before implantation in the uterus, thus they are called interceptives, or they eliminate the newly implanted embryo altogether, thus they are called contragestives. Since abortion is a criminal offense, the government cannot be part of any program that gives out abortifacients, even if the constitutional ban on state-supplied contraceptives did not exist.

5. Fifth, precisely because State contraception and sterilization are constitutionally prohibited, even if the RH bill were passed on the vote of a “lynch-mob” majority, that would not make it constitutional nor give it the first property of a just law. As Pope Benedict XVI says, “there are things that are always wrong and can never be legalized,” just as “there are some things that absolutely always remain legally binding, things that precede every majority decision, things that majority decisions must respect.” Instead of clearing the way for the massive public distribution of contraceptives and sterilization agents as essential medicines, an unjust law could simply provoke passive or active resistance among a particular class of Filipinos. That could ultimately create worse problems for the society and the State.

Q. The opponents of the RH bill appear to ignore altogether the fact that the bill allows men and women to choose between “modern contraceptives” and the traditional method or natural family planning. Do you also reject natural family planning (NFP)?

A. The bill makes passing mention of NFP, but its real focus is on state contraception and sterilization. Nothing in the bill says NFP shall be promoted as an essential service to married couples, that medical personnel will be trained to provide the service and to train others, that every hospital and clinic and every commercial establishment, etc. will be required to have a specific number of personnel who are skilled in the Billings method or something else. In contrast, there is a detailed proposal on how the State will provide contraceptives and sterilization agents to the public. The token reference to NFP is mere icing on the cake.

But let us first clarify our terms. No parity exists between contraception and NFP. NFP is not contraception---not by a long shot. Contraception requires the use of an artificial method to prevent fertilization, which occurs when a spermatozoa successfully penetrates the ovum in the fallopian tubes. NFP on the other hand simply requires the married couple to abstain from sex during the wife’s fertile period to avoid a possible pregnancy. It does not interfere with a woman’s fertility cycle, nor attempt to render infertile a woman’s fertile period. Because it is not contraception, couples may freely use it to space child-bearing, and the State can support it, consistent with its constitutional duty “to defend the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.”

Q. How effective, and how difficult, is the successful practice of NFP?

A. Some studies in the early 90s have shown that NFP could be
effective up to 98 percent, or higher. But those studies did not
create any strong demand for NFP, simply because the method
does not give the big pharmaceutical firms or even government
bureaucrats the opportunity to make large piles of money.

Q. Aside from State contraception and sterilization, the RH bill is
proposing a mandatory age-appropriate sex education for students
from Grade V up to high school without parental consent. What is
so outrageous about that? Shouldn’t parents welcome it as a
necessary help in the education of their children?

A. Both the Constitution and moral law recognize parents as the natural and primary educators of their children. The State cannot take away that right without turning totalitarian, and parents cannot throw it away without submitting to totalitarianism and showing themselves to be irresponsible, unpatriotic and unfit to become parents. The rank audacity of that proposal is compounded by the patent profanity (lapsing into occasional pornography) of the graphic images that are being piloted as instructional materials in various places as of now. They have no ethically redeeming value, are clearly destructive of the moral character and sexual composure and purity of the young.

Q. Should Catholics oppose the RH bill because it is unconstitutional
or because it goes against the teaching of the Church? What about
non-Catholics?

A. Catholics and non-Catholics should oppose the bill on
constitutional and moral grounds. Both the Constitution and the moral law must be followed at all times. Both are assaulted with equal severity by the RH bill. The moral law is not for Catholics only, and the Constitution binds all citizens. Article II of the Constitution, entitled DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES AND STATE POLICIES, and Article XV, THE FAMILY, speak of “the sanctity of human life; the family as the foundation of the nation; marriage as the foundation of the family and as an inviolable social institution; the right of spouses to found a family according to their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood; the right of the mother to bear a child and the right of the unborn child to be born; the right of parents to be the primary educators of their children; the right of youth and women to achieve their full potential as persons and as citizens; the right of the people to health and to a balanced environment in harmony with nature.”

These policies are not self-enforcing. They need an enabling
law to put flesh and bones into them. The RH bill cannot possibly be that.

The RH bill reads: AN ACT PROVIDING FOR A NATIONAL POLICY
ON REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, RESPONSIBLE PARENTHOOD AND
POPULATION DEVELOPMENT. How does it relate to the constitutional policy or policies laid down in Article II and Article XV on procreation and childbearing, responsible parenthood and population development? It has no bearing at all.

The term “reproductive health” does not appear in our Constitution. It is a new coinage, which entered “international” usage only recently. The World Health Organization, the UN Fund for Population Activities, and the various UN agencies, as well as the US and at least G-8 seem agreed that the term includes “access to abortion.” The authors of the RH bill, on the other hand, assure us that the term does not include “access to abortion,” which remains a punishable crime.

Since the bill invokes “international law” as part of the bases of
its proposals, it seems but right that whatever “international term” is used should carry its popularly accepted international meaning. Otherwise, the bill should use univocal and unambiguous terms only, understandable to Filipinos, for whom the proposed law is written. No legal text should have one meaning for a foreign audience and another meaning for the local. The term “reproductive health” should probably be avoided altogether.

Obviously, “reproductive health” is intended to clothe in
bureaucratic Newspeak the health issues related to childbearing. If
that is so, and we detect no evidence to the contrary, then the RH
bill is seeking to introduce a policy where the Constitution has
already formulated a policy or policies. Is that permissible? Not
so. The only thing Congress can do is to propose a law to
implement a non-self-enforcing constitutional policy or policies.
Can the RH bill do that? Not likely. Why? Because its provisions
are headed in the opposite direction. The pro-RH solons need to
craft a new and better bill.

Q. As a Catholic, should I listen to my bishop or to my congressman
and the senators on this issue? Please enlighten me.

A. Listen to all. It is a constitutional and moral issue. So listen to
your bishop because the bill is addressed to your whole person, to
everything that you are, your body and soul, your politics, your
economic and social wellbeing, your relations with everyone in your family, and with others, your salvation above all.

Does the State or Government have the right to intervene in the most
intimate acts that bind a man and a woman in marriage, or are
these not sacred precincts where not even the State may intrude?

Congress can pass no law “abridging the freedom of speech, of
expression, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.”
Can that same Congress now pass a law abridging a married couple’s
God-given right to exchange seed and substance in the conjugal
act?

The State has no right to tell a journalist, broadcaster, or
legislator what to say on any subject, how to say it, and how much
time to take in saying it. Does the same State have a higher right to
tell a man how to embrace and make love to his wife?

This is a fundamental moral and meta-legal issue, which must be
clear to every adult person, and on which the Church has a right and
duty to pronounce her position on behalf of the whole person;
listen to it. And listen to your congressman and senators, too,
because it is a constitutional issue and every legislation must
conform to the Constitution. You have a right to expect your
congressman and senators to be familiar with the Constitution and
to be faithful to it. And because the legislators are supposed to
represent the people, and you are a part of the people, make sure
they listen to you, too. Above all, they have a specific duty under Section 3 (4), Article XV of the Constitution to listen to families and family associations in the planning and implementation of programs affecting them.

The State is not mandated to act as the official enforcer of Catholic teaching, or the teaching of any church for that matter, but does the State have the right, or the duty, to enact a law that attacks a specific Church doctrine and requires Catholic taxpayers to fund the program that criminally attacks that doctrine of their faith?

That would be entirely unjust in a situation where Catholics were a small minority. But where they constitute the overwhelming majority, it would be more than unjust: it would be rank tyranny. Especially since, while defending their rights, they are not taking anything away from, or imposing any burden on, any religious minority. The injury to the common good would persist even if Catholics were no longer made to pay their taxes and declared exempt from the unjust law.

Q. But not all the parties are agreed on when life begins. One group says
life begins upon fertilization of the ovum, another group says it begins upon its implantation upon the uterus. Who will resolve this conflict, and how can one take a definitive position against contraception or sterilization while this issue is unresolved?

A. Not being a medical doctor, I can only refer to the accepted wisdom of the ages. For as long as memory holds, the medical profession and the rest of humanity have always understood conception as synonymous with fertilization. The records of the 1986 Constitutional Commission show that when they were debating the provision, that “the State shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception,” they agreed that conception meant fertilization. Now there are attempts to redefine that. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, for one, defines pregnancy as beginning with implantation. But this seems more in line with some political agenda than with any recent discovery of modern science. The new claim therefore has failed to displace or disturb the settled view of the medical profession: pregnancy begins at fertilization.

Nevertheless, the point I am making has nothing to do with that. It is simply this, that when the Constitution says the State shall protect the life of the unborn from conception, it means that at whatever point life begins—whether upon fertilizer or upon implantation---the duty of the State is to “protect the the life of the unborn” from that moment on. It does not change. Therefore the government cannot be part of a contraception or sterilization program, whose purpose is to prevent women from conceiving. We just cannot have an absurd situation where the State, through its RH program, actively prevents babies from being conceived, so that at the end of the day it would be able to say, “Sorry, we have no unborn babies to protect.”

Q. Is it not possible to debate this issue without involving our faith? Doesn’t the Catholic Church realize that it is losing many of its members for speaking out so strongly on this issue?

A. Yes and no.

Yes, if the proponents of the RH bill could but answer three simple questions:

1) Does the State or the government have the right or duty to tell any married couple how to perform their marital rights and duties in the privacy of their bedroom?

2) If the State is the protector of the life of the unborn from the moment of conception, does it have the right or duty to run a simultaneous contraception and sterilization program whose main, if not sole, purpose is to prevent women from conceiving?

3) If the Constitution recognizes parents as the natural and primary educators of their children, does the State have the right or duty to impose a compulsory sex education program on minor schoolchildren, without parental consent?

Religion does not have to figure at all. But wherever and whenever human dignity is attacked, men and women of faith have a right and a duty to speak out. For as De Tocqueville puts it, “despotism can govern without faith, but liberty cannot.” The oft-misquoted “separation” of Church and State does not separate the State from God. That’s why in the first line of the Preamble of our Constitution, we implore “the aid of Almighty God.” And the President’s oath to “preserve and defend the Constitution, execute (the nation’s) laws, do justice to every man and consecrate myself to the service of the Nation,” ends with, “So help me God.”

And as Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, the Archbishop of Cebu, reminds us, why was the intervention of the bishops so welcome and cheered in February 1986 when they said Ferdinand Marcos had lost the moral authority to govern after winning the snap presidential elections, and now, there is every attempt to silence their objection to the RH bill, which threatens to destroy the integrity of the human person, the family and the entire society? Out of pure cussedness, they even cheer the pro-RH boor who tried to disrupt an ecumenical service at the Manila Cathedral.

The Church to whom most of us belong is not out there to win a rigged survey or popularity contest. She will speak the truth as the truth needs to be said, and when all her false supporters have gone, she will be standing there, stronger than the strongest oak, empty of all false pretences and filled to overflowing with the spirit of God.

Q. Are you still hopeful then that the President could finally be persuaded to reconsider his announced position on the RH bill?

A. One has to be. The pressure from abroad is understandably enormous, but it is a question of the Constitution and national sovereignty. The President’s duty is to defend both at all times, from all forces, including our own friends and allies. That is non-negotiable. And he still has some time to study the Constitution and the history of population control, and what it proposes to do and has already done to mankind. It is a great opportunity for conversion and transformation. Especially if he could see that the effort of the global anti-life forces to redefine the human being, the family and marriage is not a smaller matter than the travel advisories against the Philippines that seem to cause him so much anxiety these days.

Q. If what you say is true, that the RH bill is an imperialist ploy, then why is it that the usual “conservatives” are the ones opposing it, while the so-called “progressives” and “nationalists” are the ones pushing for it?

A. That is one of the great mysteries of our time. We should ask our progressive and nationalist friends why. If they are prepared to shout anti-imperialist slogans, burn the American flag to protest the rape of a Filipino woman by a drunken American sailor, and march for the expulsion of the visiting US forces in Mindanao at the slightest excuse, why are they the first ones to abuse those who oppose with conviction a bill that seeks to impose a racist and anti-poor population control policy on their unsuspecting and misinformed countrymen? Not enough nationalism and patriotism seems to be going on there. But we can’t afford to give up on anyone. We continue to pray that they’ll come around. Our greatest enemy is not malice but ignorance.

Q. The surveys seem to indicate the pro-RH group has all the numbers, both inside and outside Congress. Is it not time to throw in the towel, or are you praying for a miracle?

A. We must pray for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to prevail. Let’s not forget that nobody can fool all the people all the time. Until the last elections, the paid pollsters and the conscript media had a good run. So many had been fooled by them.

But we know, and they know we know, what kind of deception they had been foisting upon our people. Soon enough the truth will overtake them. So let’s not play their game. Let us instead try to get everyone to answer the following questions:

1. Do you honestly believe that any government has the right to tell any married couple what to do before, during and after marital intercourse?

2. Do you honestly believe that lawmakers and the President could simply ignore the Constitution and the natural moral law and do what the population controllers and the donor institutions are asking them to do without any cost or consequence?

3. Do you honestly believe that if they did all that, the people would simply do nothing and the government would still have any moral authority to govern?

There cannot be any two ways of reading the moral law and the Constitution. To return to the basic issue:

1) If the State is the protector of the life of the unborn from the moment of conception, it cannot run a program that will prevent women from conceiving.

2) If parents are the natural and primary educators of their chldren, the State cannot impose a mandatory sex education program on minor schoolchildren without parental consent.

3) The State cannot do all these things without abolishing the Constitution and morphing into a totalitarian order.

So it’s not just a numbers game. Legislation must begin with the truth
and justice. Even the foreign population controllers must know this,
otherwise they would just be funding civil disorder.

Q. Is there anything good at all which the Government can do under the circumstances?

A. The best thing the Government can do is simply to follow the Constitution, uphold and safeguard the nation’s sovereignty, and protect the culture of our people. Colonialism is long over. Let us not allow ourselves to become the plaything of those who want to impose their hedonistic ideologies and flawed lifestyles upon our culture. We have so much to teach them, they have very little to teach us, outside of science and technology, which needs to be governed by ethics in any case.

The best policy the Government can adopt is the first thing known to the medical profession: DO NO HARM. NEITHER PROHIBIT NOR PROVIDE CONTRACEPTIVES TO THE PUBLIC, BUT MAKE SURE EVERYONE IS PROTECTED FROM DIRECT STERILIZATION, AND THOSE WHO ARE CONTRACEPTING ARE LIKEWISE ADEQUATELY PROTECTED FROM ANY SIDE EFFECTS OF THEIR CONTRACEPTIVES, AND FROM INTERCEPTIVES, CONTRAGESTIVES AND ABORTIFACIENTS, WHICH SHOULD ALL BE BANNED.

Q. Does it mean there is absolutely nothing in the RH bill worthy of enactment? A paper issued jointly by Loyola School of Theology and the John J. Carroll Institute on Church and Social Issues, and specifically attributed to three distinguished Jesuits-----Fathers Eric O. Genilo, S.J., John J. Carroll, S. J., and Joaquin Bernas, S. J. ----says “total rejection of the bill…will not change the status quo of high rates of infant mortality, maternal deaths, and abortions.” What is your take on that?

A. Infant and maternal mortality needs to be adequately addressed, and
the proper medical response is known. It is not contraceptives or sterilization agents. The same with criminal abortion. In fact, the bill contains several good provisions that could be immediately
implemented to address this and other problems. For instance:

• The establishment or upgrading of hospitals with adequate and qualified personnel, equipment and supplies to be able to provide emergency obstetric care. Or the establishment of one hospital for comprehensive emergency obstetric care and four hospitals for basic emergency obstetric care to serve every 500,000 population.

• The proposal that all LGUs, national and local government hospitals, and other public health units conduct an annual maternal death review in accordance with guidelines set by the DOH.

• The proposal that all serious and life threatening reproductive health conditions such as HIV and AIDS, breast and reproductive tract cancers, and obstetric complications be given maximum benefits as provided by PhilHealth programs.

• The proposal that a Mobile Health Care Service in the form of a van or other means of transportation appropriate to coastal and mountainous areas deliver legitimate health care goods and services, minus the controversial ones.

All these could be done right now with a modicum of creativity and political will. They could be made part of the ongoing health program and adequately funded, just as the present DOH-Popcom RH program has been consistently funded over the years, even if it lacks any constitutional leg to stand on. These need not be legislated at all. That they are in the RH bill is probably simply to provide an ornamental function, some window dressing, to make it appear that the bill is not toxic altogether. But the Executive, if it so desires, could implement them now, without delay, and with no legal impediment.