It is sad to read about the Senate reeling under the charge that one member had managed to insert P400-million in the 2008 and 2009 budgets for a “road to nowhere”, and how this charge has apparently divided the Chamber.
Not many would be amazed if something like this happened in the House of Representatives or in some provincial or city council.. But somehow people seem to have higher expectations of their senators.
I am hoping the ultimate facts are not as bad as the story first appears, and that the whole thing could be sorted out and satisfactorily explained. Senate President Manny Villar seems confident the public would be reassured once the whole truth is known.
I would like to give the Senate leadership the benefit of the doubt.
However, I have some misgivings about the Senate on another issue --- how its members comply with their own Rules. I happen to believe that a deliberative assembly rises or falls on the basis of how its members follow its Rules. This usually determines how best they respond to the issues.
No member of Congress should treat the Rules cavalierly. It is a grave disorder when those in charge do not seem to notice when the Rules are violated, or when they violate them themselves. The dignity of the proceedings and of the institution itself is the first that suffers.
It was my concern as a student of parliamentary politics and a chairman of the Senate rules committee and Senate Majority Leader for many years that prompted me last July 28 to write the Senate a letter asking to be clarified on two not so small issues.
First, Section 13 of the Rules of the Senate provides that no bill or resolution shall be referred to more than two committees, except when it has an appropriations aspect, in which case it is referred also to the Finance committee or when it has a tax aspect, in which case it is referred also to Ways and Means.
In recent months many measures had been referred to more than three committees, in violation of this Rule.
Second, committee hearings were being held with only two senators present, regardless of the size of the committee. This was a clear violation of Rule 22 which says, “one-third of all regular members of the committee shall constitute a quorum, but in no case shall it be less than two.”
The last part of that Rule simply means that when a committee is so small that one third of its regular membership is fewer than two, the number should be rounded off to two. For all other committees, one-third of all the members should constitute a quorum. The committees were all apparently misreading this Rule.
Failing to get a reply, I wrote a second letter on September 1 to restate my query and to remind the Senate leadership that under Section 5 (a) of Republic Act 6713, otherwise known as Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, they were required to answer my letter “within fifteen working days from receipt thereof.”
Since they had failed to do so, the law has then been violated. And violation of the law carries a penalty of a fine not exceeding the equivalent of six months’ salary or suspension from office not exceeding one year or outright removal, depending on the gravity of the offense.
I was not interested in prosecuting but I wanted a ruling on the issues. The question of quorum had become suddenly more urgent after I had on August 11 attended a joint hearing of six committees of questionable validity. The six committees had a combined membership of 78, but only three were present in lieu of 26, when the hearing began. The primary committee alone needed at least four to constitute a quorum.
My worry is that if the primary committee decides to support passage of the bill in which I had intervened on the basis of the joint hearings held without a quorum I may have to question it in court. . I would like to avoid that, so I am hoping the Senate will act properly.
My query is not at all easy. The correct ruling will have to declare all big committee hearings with only two senators present null and void. But what would happen if the Supreme Court ruled on the issue? The same thing, except that the embarrassment would have been completely unnecessary.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
Correction in "The New Central Economy Planners" post
05 September 2008
MR. JORGE V. ARUTA
OPINION EDITOR
PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER
MAKATI
Dear Editor:
My sincerest thanks to Fr. John J. Carroll, S. J. for calling attention to an inexcusable lapse in my blog on the 26 UP economists’ support for the House reproductive health bill. May I assure him, all the 26 economists and those who had read my piece that no malice was intended.
Not having read the source-document, I had to rely on the PDI report on it of August 14. It quoted the economists as saying “57% of poor Filipino families had nine or more children.”
I had serious doubts about that, and wanted to say so in my blog. Unfortunately, instead of saying “57% of poor Filipino families,” the computer wrote, “57% of Filipino families.” The loss of one word (“poor”) made all the difference, and I didn’t realize it until I read Fr. Carroll’s piece.
There is an explanation for it, but not an excuse. Chesterton once said that “having written it, no power on earth can force me to read it.” It takes someone like Fr. Carroll to remind us we may not even be nearly half as good.
Very sincerely yours,
FRANCISCO S. TATAD
MR. JORGE V. ARUTA
OPINION EDITOR
PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER
MAKATI
Dear Editor:
My sincerest thanks to Fr. John J. Carroll, S. J. for calling attention to an inexcusable lapse in my blog on the 26 UP economists’ support for the House reproductive health bill. May I assure him, all the 26 economists and those who had read my piece that no malice was intended.
Not having read the source-document, I had to rely on the PDI report on it of August 14. It quoted the economists as saying “57% of poor Filipino families had nine or more children.”
I had serious doubts about that, and wanted to say so in my blog. Unfortunately, instead of saying “57% of poor Filipino families,” the computer wrote, “57% of Filipino families.” The loss of one word (“poor”) made all the difference, and I didn’t realize it until I read Fr. Carroll’s piece.
There is an explanation for it, but not an excuse. Chesterton once said that “having written it, no power on earth can force me to read it.” It takes someone like Fr. Carroll to remind us we may not even be nearly half as good.
Very sincerely yours,
FRANCISCO S. TATAD
---
Note to readers: The said article has been corrected as of today. The revised version may be viewed here.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Fated to self-destruct
I have tried from the very start to use substantive arguments to show why we must reject the reproductive health bills. The objections are moral, constitutional and meta constitutional. And they have not been refuted at all. But it looks like the bills are fated to self-destruct, even on procedural grounds.
The first objection has to do with the “right” of the State to enter the bedroom, and tell poor married couples they cannot exercise their conjugal rights and engage in the marital act unless they first use contraceptives or get sterilized.
Does the State or anybody else for that matter have that right?
I have been saying nobody has that right, and no one has been able to show me that the State has.
Were an African dictator to impose such policy on his people, he would be held criminally accountable under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which prohibits “measures intended to prevent births within a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
But probably because the embryonic dictatorship is not African, our anti-reproduction guys want the State to intervene in an area of human activity where it does not have any authority or competence to intervene at all.
What I have been saying is that it is not a proper area for legislation. But the proponents of the anti-reproduction bills apparently believe they are omnipotent, and that they can legislate anything they want to legislate just because they are legislators. Dirty Harry (not the Angelic Doctor) has the best quote for this: “A man must know his limitations.”
The State has its limitations. It can ask the citizen to risk his life in defense of his country, it can tax him to death, although that would be oppressive; it can expropriate his most valued piece of land for public use; it can do any number of things which he may not exactly relish. But it cannot tell a journalist how he will write, or a congressman how he will think. It certainly cannot tell a man how to embrace his wife or father his child.
The Bill of Rights says, “No law shall be passed 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 right of a man and a woman to be left alone in the privacy of their bedroom and to embrace and make love as husband and wife belongs to an infinitely higher order of rights than any of those mentioned in this provision. The Constitution calls it sacred, and it is not a simple constitutional right. It is a meta-constitutional right. Meaning, above the Constitution.
The right to love and make love, to realize oneself fully as a human person and connect intimately to one’s Creator through love is a God-given right. It could even stand higher, but not lower, than the right to breathe, to think, and to speak. How can any group of legislators believe they have a right to put that transcendental right under the boot of foreign population controllers and their conscript State?
But the Constitution is abundantly clear. It does not equivocate. The family, which is founded on marriage, is the foundation of the nation. Family life is sacred, autonomous and inviolate. The family’s religious beliefs shall be protected by the State. “The State shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.”
The sentence in quotes needs no interpretation. The State shall not allow the destruction of any unborn child. So abortion is out. But does it allow contraception? As an individual decision and action of women, yes; but not as an activity of the State. For how can the State be a protector of the unborn from the moment of conception, if its first program is to try to prevent women from conceiving?
We cannot hold the State accountable if married women decide to contracept either on their own, or on the prodding of a private individual or institution, and as a result succeed in completely avoiding conception. But if the State itself engages in an active program of contraception and sterilization, even if that program fails, then it has already violated its clearly mandated duty under the Constitution.
The present bills are actual proposals for the State to commit that violation. Can there be a more perverse piece of legislation?
But as stated in the beginning, the bills could founder on the rock of procedural questions. And here’s how.
In the House of Representatives, only one committee hearing was held before they consolidated four bills into one, and announced it would now be debated on the Floor. That does not comply with the constitutional requirement of adequate consultations.
In the. Senate, two joint hearings have been held so far. In the first hearing, two senators attended; in the second, three. The Rules require that one-third of the regular members of a committee shall constitute a quorum. The six committees named in the joint hearings have a combined membership of 78 senators. One third is 26, bigger than the entire Senate.
The hearings therefore had no quorum. They were all invalid, and not in a position to recommend anything to the plenary at all.
The first objection has to do with the “right” of the State to enter the bedroom, and tell poor married couples they cannot exercise their conjugal rights and engage in the marital act unless they first use contraceptives or get sterilized.
Does the State or anybody else for that matter have that right?
I have been saying nobody has that right, and no one has been able to show me that the State has.
Were an African dictator to impose such policy on his people, he would be held criminally accountable under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which prohibits “measures intended to prevent births within a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
But probably because the embryonic dictatorship is not African, our anti-reproduction guys want the State to intervene in an area of human activity where it does not have any authority or competence to intervene at all.
What I have been saying is that it is not a proper area for legislation. But the proponents of the anti-reproduction bills apparently believe they are omnipotent, and that they can legislate anything they want to legislate just because they are legislators. Dirty Harry (not the Angelic Doctor) has the best quote for this: “A man must know his limitations.”
The State has its limitations. It can ask the citizen to risk his life in defense of his country, it can tax him to death, although that would be oppressive; it can expropriate his most valued piece of land for public use; it can do any number of things which he may not exactly relish. But it cannot tell a journalist how he will write, or a congressman how he will think. It certainly cannot tell a man how to embrace his wife or father his child.
The Bill of Rights says, “No law shall be passed 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 right of a man and a woman to be left alone in the privacy of their bedroom and to embrace and make love as husband and wife belongs to an infinitely higher order of rights than any of those mentioned in this provision. The Constitution calls it sacred, and it is not a simple constitutional right. It is a meta-constitutional right. Meaning, above the Constitution.
The right to love and make love, to realize oneself fully as a human person and connect intimately to one’s Creator through love is a God-given right. It could even stand higher, but not lower, than the right to breathe, to think, and to speak. How can any group of legislators believe they have a right to put that transcendental right under the boot of foreign population controllers and their conscript State?
But the Constitution is abundantly clear. It does not equivocate. The family, which is founded on marriage, is the foundation of the nation. Family life is sacred, autonomous and inviolate. The family’s religious beliefs shall be protected by the State. “The State shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.”
The sentence in quotes needs no interpretation. The State shall not allow the destruction of any unborn child. So abortion is out. But does it allow contraception? As an individual decision and action of women, yes; but not as an activity of the State. For how can the State be a protector of the unborn from the moment of conception, if its first program is to try to prevent women from conceiving?
We cannot hold the State accountable if married women decide to contracept either on their own, or on the prodding of a private individual or institution, and as a result succeed in completely avoiding conception. But if the State itself engages in an active program of contraception and sterilization, even if that program fails, then it has already violated its clearly mandated duty under the Constitution.
The present bills are actual proposals for the State to commit that violation. Can there be a more perverse piece of legislation?
But as stated in the beginning, the bills could founder on the rock of procedural questions. And here’s how.
In the House of Representatives, only one committee hearing was held before they consolidated four bills into one, and announced it would now be debated on the Floor. That does not comply with the constitutional requirement of adequate consultations.
In the. Senate, two joint hearings have been held so far. In the first hearing, two senators attended; in the second, three. The Rules require that one-third of the regular members of a committee shall constitute a quorum. The six committees named in the joint hearings have a combined membership of 78 senators. One third is 26, bigger than the entire Senate.
The hearings therefore had no quorum. They were all invalid, and not in a position to recommend anything to the plenary at all.
Time to fight for our beliefs
Some readers are asking: is there no danger that our lawmakers will sacrifice the right of Catholics to live their family life according to their faith to the demands and dictates of the international anti-population lobby, just as Malacanang’s “peace” negotiators have tried to give away the lands owned and occupied by Christians in Mindanao to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the name of a bogus peace?
It seems an unfair question, but let’s understand why it is being put. Even as Mindanao is being ripped apart after the government tried to give away “ancestral lands” to the MILF as the “homeland of the Bangsamoros,” there is a very clear organized effort to stampede the Congress into approving a proposed “reproductive health” legislation, which is an utter abomination to law-abiding Filipinos, notably the Catholics
In the past few weeks, I have been “guesting” in various forums, and it has become clear to me that it is not a small advocacy group that is pushing the “reproductive health” agenda, but something global and infinitely more sinister and insidious. It is an ideological group determined to inflict the worst form of imperialism upon the Filipino people.
In many of these forums, the “moderator” is usually a supporter of population control and tries to push his or her bias, instead of simply complying with his or her job description. Whenever there are sponsors, they usually include a condoms manufacturer or distributor or an entity called Philippine Legislators Committee for Population and Development (PLCPD), which was not created by Congress.
The PLCPD declares on its website (http//:plcpd.org.ph) that it was established in December 1989 as a “non-stock, non-profit foundation dedicated to the formulation of viable public policies requiring legislation on population management and socio-economic development.” It lists several senators and congressmen as members. Its donor agencies include UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
All these donors are actively engaged in promoting population control. PLCPD’s executive director is a scholar-grantee of the Packard Foundation. A recent press statement attributed to the Foundation complained that the Philippine government had stopped buying condoms.
To which the appropriations committee of the House of Representatives chaired by Rep. Edcel Lagman had an instant reply. The committee promptly approved a whooping P3.4 billion funding for the highly questionable bill, of which Lagman himself is the principal author. Except for tuberculosis, which gets some meager funding, there is no similar funding to address the seven leading killers that daily kill at least 300 out of every 100,000 women.
The appropriation for reproductive health reads like one mega sales contract for the official purchase of condoms and contraceptives with the leading manufacturers and distributors. Better than any congressional insertion, which is the other name for the congressmen’s “pork barrel.”
In my nine years as Senator, mostly as Senate majority leader, from 1992 to 2001, I had never heard of the PLCPD. It did not circulate any advocacy document in the Senate. Today, it seems to have acquired an ubiquitous presence, not only in Congress and but also in various forums where the reproductive health issue is talked about.
Its executive officer was among over 40 NGO resource persons who swamped the last Senate hearing with their highly aggressive push for the Senate reproductive health bills. He gave the principal statement in favor of the House bill in a recent UP forum, where one of the co-authors was a participant. His input was not all that significant, and perhaps we could stretch the meaning of the word “advocacy” and simply call it that.
But what he and his organization represent in the entire process, and the amazing space which the members of Congress appear to have given them in their legislative work should disturb anyone who has any notion of an independent country’s sovereign rights. Advocacy and lobbying are legal activities, provided certain requirements are met; but active intervention in the legislative work of Congress by outsiders is certainly not.
Now, the PLCPD staff is commonly and casually credited with the drafting of the various bills filed by the different authors in the two Houses. Even the most widely denounced House substitute bill, which consolidates four component bills into one, after only one public hearing, is attributed to this group. That bill should have been put together by the Joint Committees on Health and on Population and Family Relations, to which the original bills had been referred. Or, more specifically, by a Technical Working Group created by the joint committees for that purpose. Not so; the PLCD staff did it.
Of course, this will be denied. But the uniformity of concepts and language – the same appalling rhetoric in the explanatory notes and in the body of the bills –is utterly conclusive. It’s one assembly line; you don’t have to be a literary Sherlock Holmes to see it.
Is there no law against it? The very idea of a foreign entity or someone working for a foreign entity actively messing up with the work of Congress is so unthinkable that neither the Constitution nor the Rules of either House found it necessary to talk about it. The law does not have to say anything where the matter is so clear to the plainest common sense.
But acting from sheer abundance of caution, Batas Pambansa 39, otherwise known as the Foreign Agents Act of 1979, requires entities like PLCPD to perform certain acts before they can engage in any lobbying activity. Of course, this is not merely lobbying but actual intervention in the internal work of Congress. Under BP 39, which I authored together with then Minister (now Senator) Juan Ponce Enrile in the Batasang Pambansa, the PLCPD must first register as a “foreign agent” before it can circulate any position on any issue before Congress.
Why foreign agent? Because foreign agent is “any person who acts or agrees to act as political consultant, public relations counsel, publicity agent, information representative, or as agent, servant, representative or attorney for a foreign principal or any domestic organization subsidized directly or indirectly in whole or in part by a foreign principal.”
All the donor agencies listed by PLCPD on its website are foreigners. The agenda the PLCPD is pursuing from the same sources is likewise foreign---a global policy of population control inspired by the 1974 secret U.S. document, National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, otherwise known as the Kissinger Report, which seeks to reduce the family size to two children (worldwide) by the year 2000..
The title of that Report “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” says clearly and without any equivocation in whose interest the global population reduction and the family downsizing are for. The contents reveal enough of what is to be done. Encourage local leaders of developing countries to be in the forefront and to take credit for any success. Make extensive use of the mass media and other information systems, particularly among “large and illiterate rural communities.”
So scratch PLCPD’s skin a little, and you’ll see the awesome coalition of foreign eugenicists and Malthusians trying to push their anti-life and anti-family program in the Philippines.
The senators and congressmen who have signed up may or may not know all this at all. So with the brand and customary nationalists who are otherwise quick to denounce foreign intervention in our internal affairs.
This is a good time for them to reexamine their position, and try to ward off the most vicious form of imperialism that has tried to latch on to our innermost lives as a people. This is a good time for all thoughtful Filipinos who want to live their personal lives according to their moral values and religious beliefs to come together and see what can be done.
A violent clash of values may have become unavoidable.
It seems an unfair question, but let’s understand why it is being put. Even as Mindanao is being ripped apart after the government tried to give away “ancestral lands” to the MILF as the “homeland of the Bangsamoros,” there is a very clear organized effort to stampede the Congress into approving a proposed “reproductive health” legislation, which is an utter abomination to law-abiding Filipinos, notably the Catholics
In the past few weeks, I have been “guesting” in various forums, and it has become clear to me that it is not a small advocacy group that is pushing the “reproductive health” agenda, but something global and infinitely more sinister and insidious. It is an ideological group determined to inflict the worst form of imperialism upon the Filipino people.
In many of these forums, the “moderator” is usually a supporter of population control and tries to push his or her bias, instead of simply complying with his or her job description. Whenever there are sponsors, they usually include a condoms manufacturer or distributor or an entity called Philippine Legislators Committee for Population and Development (PLCPD), which was not created by Congress.
The PLCPD declares on its website (http//:plcpd.org.ph) that it was established in December 1989 as a “non-stock, non-profit foundation dedicated to the formulation of viable public policies requiring legislation on population management and socio-economic development.” It lists several senators and congressmen as members. Its donor agencies include UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
All these donors are actively engaged in promoting population control. PLCPD’s executive director is a scholar-grantee of the Packard Foundation. A recent press statement attributed to the Foundation complained that the Philippine government had stopped buying condoms.
To which the appropriations committee of the House of Representatives chaired by Rep. Edcel Lagman had an instant reply. The committee promptly approved a whooping P3.4 billion funding for the highly questionable bill, of which Lagman himself is the principal author. Except for tuberculosis, which gets some meager funding, there is no similar funding to address the seven leading killers that daily kill at least 300 out of every 100,000 women.
The appropriation for reproductive health reads like one mega sales contract for the official purchase of condoms and contraceptives with the leading manufacturers and distributors. Better than any congressional insertion, which is the other name for the congressmen’s “pork barrel.”
In my nine years as Senator, mostly as Senate majority leader, from 1992 to 2001, I had never heard of the PLCPD. It did not circulate any advocacy document in the Senate. Today, it seems to have acquired an ubiquitous presence, not only in Congress and but also in various forums where the reproductive health issue is talked about.
Its executive officer was among over 40 NGO resource persons who swamped the last Senate hearing with their highly aggressive push for the Senate reproductive health bills. He gave the principal statement in favor of the House bill in a recent UP forum, where one of the co-authors was a participant. His input was not all that significant, and perhaps we could stretch the meaning of the word “advocacy” and simply call it that.
But what he and his organization represent in the entire process, and the amazing space which the members of Congress appear to have given them in their legislative work should disturb anyone who has any notion of an independent country’s sovereign rights. Advocacy and lobbying are legal activities, provided certain requirements are met; but active intervention in the legislative work of Congress by outsiders is certainly not.
Now, the PLCPD staff is commonly and casually credited with the drafting of the various bills filed by the different authors in the two Houses. Even the most widely denounced House substitute bill, which consolidates four component bills into one, after only one public hearing, is attributed to this group. That bill should have been put together by the Joint Committees on Health and on Population and Family Relations, to which the original bills had been referred. Or, more specifically, by a Technical Working Group created by the joint committees for that purpose. Not so; the PLCD staff did it.
Of course, this will be denied. But the uniformity of concepts and language – the same appalling rhetoric in the explanatory notes and in the body of the bills –is utterly conclusive. It’s one assembly line; you don’t have to be a literary Sherlock Holmes to see it.
Is there no law against it? The very idea of a foreign entity or someone working for a foreign entity actively messing up with the work of Congress is so unthinkable that neither the Constitution nor the Rules of either House found it necessary to talk about it. The law does not have to say anything where the matter is so clear to the plainest common sense.
But acting from sheer abundance of caution, Batas Pambansa 39, otherwise known as the Foreign Agents Act of 1979, requires entities like PLCPD to perform certain acts before they can engage in any lobbying activity. Of course, this is not merely lobbying but actual intervention in the internal work of Congress. Under BP 39, which I authored together with then Minister (now Senator) Juan Ponce Enrile in the Batasang Pambansa, the PLCPD must first register as a “foreign agent” before it can circulate any position on any issue before Congress.
Why foreign agent? Because foreign agent is “any person who acts or agrees to act as political consultant, public relations counsel, publicity agent, information representative, or as agent, servant, representative or attorney for a foreign principal or any domestic organization subsidized directly or indirectly in whole or in part by a foreign principal.”
All the donor agencies listed by PLCPD on its website are foreigners. The agenda the PLCPD is pursuing from the same sources is likewise foreign---a global policy of population control inspired by the 1974 secret U.S. document, National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, otherwise known as the Kissinger Report, which seeks to reduce the family size to two children (worldwide) by the year 2000..
The title of that Report “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” says clearly and without any equivocation in whose interest the global population reduction and the family downsizing are for. The contents reveal enough of what is to be done. Encourage local leaders of developing countries to be in the forefront and to take credit for any success. Make extensive use of the mass media and other information systems, particularly among “large and illiterate rural communities.”
So scratch PLCPD’s skin a little, and you’ll see the awesome coalition of foreign eugenicists and Malthusians trying to push their anti-life and anti-family program in the Philippines.
The senators and congressmen who have signed up may or may not know all this at all. So with the brand and customary nationalists who are otherwise quick to denounce foreign intervention in our internal affairs.
This is a good time for them to reexamine their position, and try to ward off the most vicious form of imperialism that has tried to latch on to our innermost lives as a people. This is a good time for all thoughtful Filipinos who want to live their personal lives according to their moral values and religious beliefs to come together and see what can be done.
A violent clash of values may have become unavoidable.
Monday, August 18, 2008
THE NEW CENTRAL ECONOMY PLANNERS
Economics, “the dismal science,” may be getting even more dismal still, as some 26 economists from the University of the Philippines attempt to tackle the complex and complicated question of procreation and population.
The economists are urging Congress to pass the highly questionable Reproductive Health bill proposing that the State actively promote and provide contraception (to women) and sterilization (to both men and women) to bring down further the country’s population growth, now 2.04 % according to the National Statistics Office, or 1.72% according to the CIA World Factbook, 2008.
Under this bill, the State will be made to provide contraceptives and abortifacients, free of charge as “essential medicines,” to an otherwise healthy population. These would include oral contraceptives which the World Health Organization’s International Research Agency on Cancer has determined to be carcinogenic (cancer-causing) to humans.
The economists worry that if the population continues to grow, the poor will only multiply. They want it checked via a state-funded program of contraception and sterilization. To them (as it is to the authors of the bill) it is not enough that there be free and unlimited market access to contraception and sterilization, as there is right now --- the State must use the taxpayers’ money to provide the harmful agents to the population.
Against all existing evidence of a steadily declining family size with an average of three children, the economists reportedly claim that 57% of poor Filipino families have nine children or more. The statistic reads like one of those manufactured electoral counts in one of our notoriously crooked elections. It smells.
These economists have been known to espouse “liberalization, privatization and deregulation.” Although there is no attempt at full disclosure, many of them identify with international institutions and agencies that swear by the same principles but are simultaneously engaged in funding population control in the Philippines.
Now, what they want done to the population is nothing short of “central economy planning,” which they purportedly abhor in principle. The subject of their central planning is not the economy though, but the private lives and social behavior of people. Quite a promotion.
Economics, by definition, concerns itself with the equitable allocation of finite resources among recipients with competing needs. But what our economics professors want to do is to allocate the human being --- or the human family --- according to the finite resources available. And they want to put the State in charge of the allocating. That is no longer economics but population engineering. You do not find that in a well-ordered liberal democratic state; you find it in a totalitarian system.
We have a pro-life Constitution, but we have no penal law barring anyone from using contraceptives, abortifacients or sterilization devices or agents. The Church continues to teach these things are wrong and harmful, just as it continues to teach that killing, stealing, adultery and fornication are gravely sinful. But just as the Church does not have the means to prevent anyone from violating any of God’s commandments, it does not have the means to prevent anyone from using contraceptives and abortifacients, from getting sterilized, or even from contracting abortion.
The actual situation then is that no one is prohibited by law from practicing contraception. In fact, across the nation, the contraception prevalence is reported at 50%. The real issue behind the RH bill, therefore, is not whether everyone should have free access to RH information and services, which they already have, but whether the State should now enter the bedroom, supervise the conjugal intercourse of married couples, and spend taxpayers’ money to try to cure pregnancy, which is not a disease, even though it sees no need to provide free medicines and medical care to men and women dying from killer-diseases.
This is not an economic question at all. The issue is primarily moral and constitutional. Morality --- the rightness or wrongness of an act ---is the basis of law; the Constitution is the fundamental law of the land. No enactment of Congress may disregard or dispense with either. But we don’t have the space for a thorough discussion here.
The first question to resolve is whether the State has the right or the authority, as distinguished from naked and unlawful power, to redefine the fundamental rights of man as man, such as his right to embrace his wife and to father her children. These rights precede the rights of the State and are not subject to its consent, concurrence or modification.
Our Constitution correctly recognizes the primacy of such rights. Section 12 of Article II recognizes “the sanctity” of family life, and the family as the “foundation of the nation.” It binds the State to “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.” This constitutes an outright ban on abortion, which is a punishable crime. It does not prohibit any individual from practicing contraception, but it necessarily prohibits the State from funding its own program of contraception or permitting any foreign-funded program of contraception to be incorporated into its own education and health delivery systems.
Why the distinction? Simply because if it is the constitutional duty of the State to equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception, it cannot be its right or duty at the same time to prevent women from conceiving.
If as a result of couples contracepting on their own, no pregnancies occur, then the State would have no one to answer to, and nothing to answer for. But if as a result of the State’s program of contraception no pregnancies occur, then the State has made a mockery of the Constitution. We would have perverted our laws and human reason itself.
So many sophisms have been thrown in to muddle this point. But you don’t need a PhD in economics or a master’s degree in law from an Ivy League University to understand it. A short home schooling in basic logic will do.
17 August 2008
The economists are urging Congress to pass the highly questionable Reproductive Health bill proposing that the State actively promote and provide contraception (to women) and sterilization (to both men and women) to bring down further the country’s population growth, now 2.04 % according to the National Statistics Office, or 1.72% according to the CIA World Factbook, 2008.
Under this bill, the State will be made to provide contraceptives and abortifacients, free of charge as “essential medicines,” to an otherwise healthy population. These would include oral contraceptives which the World Health Organization’s International Research Agency on Cancer has determined to be carcinogenic (cancer-causing) to humans.
The economists worry that if the population continues to grow, the poor will only multiply. They want it checked via a state-funded program of contraception and sterilization. To them (as it is to the authors of the bill) it is not enough that there be free and unlimited market access to contraception and sterilization, as there is right now --- the State must use the taxpayers’ money to provide the harmful agents to the population.
Against all existing evidence of a steadily declining family size with an average of three children, the economists reportedly claim that 57% of poor Filipino families have nine children or more. The statistic reads like one of those manufactured electoral counts in one of our notoriously crooked elections. It smells.
These economists have been known to espouse “liberalization, privatization and deregulation.” Although there is no attempt at full disclosure, many of them identify with international institutions and agencies that swear by the same principles but are simultaneously engaged in funding population control in the Philippines.
Now, what they want done to the population is nothing short of “central economy planning,” which they purportedly abhor in principle. The subject of their central planning is not the economy though, but the private lives and social behavior of people. Quite a promotion.
Economics, by definition, concerns itself with the equitable allocation of finite resources among recipients with competing needs. But what our economics professors want to do is to allocate the human being --- or the human family --- according to the finite resources available. And they want to put the State in charge of the allocating. That is no longer economics but population engineering. You do not find that in a well-ordered liberal democratic state; you find it in a totalitarian system.
We have a pro-life Constitution, but we have no penal law barring anyone from using contraceptives, abortifacients or sterilization devices or agents. The Church continues to teach these things are wrong and harmful, just as it continues to teach that killing, stealing, adultery and fornication are gravely sinful. But just as the Church does not have the means to prevent anyone from violating any of God’s commandments, it does not have the means to prevent anyone from using contraceptives and abortifacients, from getting sterilized, or even from contracting abortion.
The actual situation then is that no one is prohibited by law from practicing contraception. In fact, across the nation, the contraception prevalence is reported at 50%. The real issue behind the RH bill, therefore, is not whether everyone should have free access to RH information and services, which they already have, but whether the State should now enter the bedroom, supervise the conjugal intercourse of married couples, and spend taxpayers’ money to try to cure pregnancy, which is not a disease, even though it sees no need to provide free medicines and medical care to men and women dying from killer-diseases.
This is not an economic question at all. The issue is primarily moral and constitutional. Morality --- the rightness or wrongness of an act ---is the basis of law; the Constitution is the fundamental law of the land. No enactment of Congress may disregard or dispense with either. But we don’t have the space for a thorough discussion here.
The first question to resolve is whether the State has the right or the authority, as distinguished from naked and unlawful power, to redefine the fundamental rights of man as man, such as his right to embrace his wife and to father her children. These rights precede the rights of the State and are not subject to its consent, concurrence or modification.
Our Constitution correctly recognizes the primacy of such rights. Section 12 of Article II recognizes “the sanctity” of family life, and the family as the “foundation of the nation.” It binds the State to “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.” This constitutes an outright ban on abortion, which is a punishable crime. It does not prohibit any individual from practicing contraception, but it necessarily prohibits the State from funding its own program of contraception or permitting any foreign-funded program of contraception to be incorporated into its own education and health delivery systems.
Why the distinction? Simply because if it is the constitutional duty of the State to equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception, it cannot be its right or duty at the same time to prevent women from conceiving.
If as a result of couples contracepting on their own, no pregnancies occur, then the State would have no one to answer to, and nothing to answer for. But if as a result of the State’s program of contraception no pregnancies occur, then the State has made a mockery of the Constitution. We would have perverted our laws and human reason itself.
So many sophisms have been thrown in to muddle this point. But you don’t need a PhD in economics or a master’s degree in law from an Ivy League University to understand it. A short home schooling in basic logic will do.
17 August 2008
NO PLACE FOR THE RH BILL IN OUR LAW
(This is an abbreviated version of “What’s Wrong with the Reproductive Health Bill?”, condensed to fit the space limitations of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which ran it in its issue of Sunday, 17 August 2008)
The reproductive health bill in the Lower House is being presented as a health bill and an anti-poverty bill at the same time. It is neither. It is not what its authors say it is; it is everything they say it is not. It is an ideological attack on human life, the family, and our social and cultural values.
The bill rests on a flawed premise; it is unnecessary, unconstitutional, oppressive of religious belief, and destructive of public morals and family values. Its enactment into law will only deepen the already frightening ignorance about the real issues. It should be rejected.
1. FLAWED PREMISE.
Our population growth rate (National Statistics Office) is 2.04%, total fertility rate (TFR) is 3.02. The CIA World Factbook has lower figures -- growth rate, 1.728%; TFR, 3.00.
Our population density is 277 per square km. GDP per capita (PPP) is $3,400. Fifty other countries have a much lower density, yet their per capita is also much lower. Thirty-six countries are more densely populated, yet their GDP per capita is also much higher. Are the few then always richer, the many always poorer? Not at all.
Our median age is 23 years. In 139 other countries it is as high as 45.5 years (Monaco). This means a Filipino has more productive years ahead of him than his counterpart in the rich countries where the graying and dying population is no longer being replaced because of negative birth rates.
Our long-term future is bright, because of a vibrant and dynamic population.
2. UNNECESSARY.
Women who say they should be free to contracept (regardless of what the moral law or science says) are not being prevented from doing so, as witness the 50% contraceptive prevalence rate. It is a free market. But as we are not a welfare state, taxpayers have no duty to provide contraceptives to try and cure pregnancy, which is not a disease.
The State’s duty is to protect women from real diseases. At least 80 women die every day from heart diseases, 63 from vascular diseases, 51 from cancer, 45 from pneumonia, 23 from tuberculosis, 22 from diabetes; 16 from lower chronic respiratory diseases. Why are our lawmakers not demanding free medicines and services for all those afflicted?
Indeed, maternal death could be brought down to zero just by providing adequate basic and emergency obstetric care facilities and skilled medical services to women. The local officials of Gattaran, Cagayan and Sorsogon City have shown this. Why do our lawmakers insist on stuffing our women with contraceptives and abortifacients instead?
In 2005, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that oral contraceptives cause breast, liver and cervical cancer. Shouldn’t our lawmakers demand that contraceptives be banned or at least labeled as “cancer-causing,” or “dangerous to women’s health”? Why do they want them classified as “essential medicines” instead?
3. UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
a) The Philippines is a democratic and republican State. Yet the bill seems to assume we are a centrally planned economy or a totalitarian State, which controls the private lives of its citizens. Truth is, there are certain activities of man as man where the individual is completely autonomous from the State. Just as the State may not tell a politician or a journalist how or when to think, write, or speak, it may not enter the bedroom and tell married couples how or when to practice marital love.
b) Article II, Section 12 of the Constitution says: “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 use of “sanctity” makes State obedience to God’s law not only a solemn teaching of the Church, but also an express constitutional mandate. Now, when the State binds itself to “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception,” it necessarily binds itself not to do anything to prevent even one married women from conceiving. A state-funded contraceptive program is an abomination.
4. OPPRESSIVE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF
The bill seeks to tell the Catholic majority not to listen to the Church and to listen to anti-Catholic politicians instead. It seeks to establish a program which Catholic taxpayers will fund in order to attack a doctrine of their faith. Is there a worse despotism? Would the same people do the same thing to the followers of Islam or some politically active religious pressure group?
The pro-RH lobby claims surveys have shown that most Catholic women want to contracept, regardless of what the Church says about it. It is a desperate attempt to show that right or wrong can now be reduced to what you like or dislike. The truth is never the result of surveys. Contraception is wrong not because the Church has banned it; the Church has banned it because it is wrong. No amount of surveys can change that.
5.. DESTRUCTIVE OF PUBLIC MORALS
The bill seeks to impose a hedonistic sex-oriented lifestyle that aims to reduce the conjugal act to a mere exchange of physical sensations between two individuals and marriage to a purely contraceptive partnership.
Not only is it hedonistic, it is above all eugenicist. It seeks to eliminate the poor and the “socially unfit.” While it neither mandates a two-child family nor legalizes abortion, it prepares the ground for both.
In 1974, U.S. National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, entitled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,” launched the two-child family as a global population policy to be achieved by 2000. But “no country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion,” said that document.
Now you know what’s next, and where it is coming from.
(Former Senator Francisco S. Tatad represents Asia-Pacific on the Governing Boards of International Right to Life Federation, Cincinnati, Ohio, and World Youth Alliance, New York, NY.)
The reproductive health bill in the Lower House is being presented as a health bill and an anti-poverty bill at the same time. It is neither. It is not what its authors say it is; it is everything they say it is not. It is an ideological attack on human life, the family, and our social and cultural values.
The bill rests on a flawed premise; it is unnecessary, unconstitutional, oppressive of religious belief, and destructive of public morals and family values. Its enactment into law will only deepen the already frightening ignorance about the real issues. It should be rejected.
1. FLAWED PREMISE.
Our population growth rate (National Statistics Office) is 2.04%, total fertility rate (TFR) is 3.02. The CIA World Factbook has lower figures -- growth rate, 1.728%; TFR, 3.00.
Our population density is 277 per square km. GDP per capita (PPP) is $3,400. Fifty other countries have a much lower density, yet their per capita is also much lower. Thirty-six countries are more densely populated, yet their GDP per capita is also much higher. Are the few then always richer, the many always poorer? Not at all.
Our median age is 23 years. In 139 other countries it is as high as 45.5 years (Monaco). This means a Filipino has more productive years ahead of him than his counterpart in the rich countries where the graying and dying population is no longer being replaced because of negative birth rates.
Our long-term future is bright, because of a vibrant and dynamic population.
2. UNNECESSARY.
Women who say they should be free to contracept (regardless of what the moral law or science says) are not being prevented from doing so, as witness the 50% contraceptive prevalence rate. It is a free market. But as we are not a welfare state, taxpayers have no duty to provide contraceptives to try and cure pregnancy, which is not a disease.
The State’s duty is to protect women from real diseases. At least 80 women die every day from heart diseases, 63 from vascular diseases, 51 from cancer, 45 from pneumonia, 23 from tuberculosis, 22 from diabetes; 16 from lower chronic respiratory diseases. Why are our lawmakers not demanding free medicines and services for all those afflicted?
Indeed, maternal death could be brought down to zero just by providing adequate basic and emergency obstetric care facilities and skilled medical services to women. The local officials of Gattaran, Cagayan and Sorsogon City have shown this. Why do our lawmakers insist on stuffing our women with contraceptives and abortifacients instead?
In 2005, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that oral contraceptives cause breast, liver and cervical cancer. Shouldn’t our lawmakers demand that contraceptives be banned or at least labeled as “cancer-causing,” or “dangerous to women’s health”? Why do they want them classified as “essential medicines” instead?
3. UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
a) The Philippines is a democratic and republican State. Yet the bill seems to assume we are a centrally planned economy or a totalitarian State, which controls the private lives of its citizens. Truth is, there are certain activities of man as man where the individual is completely autonomous from the State. Just as the State may not tell a politician or a journalist how or when to think, write, or speak, it may not enter the bedroom and tell married couples how or when to practice marital love.
b) Article II, Section 12 of the Constitution says: “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 use of “sanctity” makes State obedience to God’s law not only a solemn teaching of the Church, but also an express constitutional mandate. Now, when the State binds itself to “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception,” it necessarily binds itself not to do anything to prevent even one married women from conceiving. A state-funded contraceptive program is an abomination.
4. OPPRESSIVE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF
The bill seeks to tell the Catholic majority not to listen to the Church and to listen to anti-Catholic politicians instead. It seeks to establish a program which Catholic taxpayers will fund in order to attack a doctrine of their faith. Is there a worse despotism? Would the same people do the same thing to the followers of Islam or some politically active religious pressure group?
The pro-RH lobby claims surveys have shown that most Catholic women want to contracept, regardless of what the Church says about it. It is a desperate attempt to show that right or wrong can now be reduced to what you like or dislike. The truth is never the result of surveys. Contraception is wrong not because the Church has banned it; the Church has banned it because it is wrong. No amount of surveys can change that.
5.. DESTRUCTIVE OF PUBLIC MORALS
The bill seeks to impose a hedonistic sex-oriented lifestyle that aims to reduce the conjugal act to a mere exchange of physical sensations between two individuals and marriage to a purely contraceptive partnership.
Not only is it hedonistic, it is above all eugenicist. It seeks to eliminate the poor and the “socially unfit.” While it neither mandates a two-child family nor legalizes abortion, it prepares the ground for both.
In 1974, U.S. National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, entitled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,” launched the two-child family as a global population policy to be achieved by 2000. But “no country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion,” said that document.
Now you know what’s next, and where it is coming from.
(Former Senator Francisco S. Tatad represents Asia-Pacific on the Governing Boards of International Right to Life Federation, Cincinnati, Ohio, and World Youth Alliance, New York, NY.)
Thursday, August 7, 2008
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH BILL?
Amid the domestic fallout of skyrocketing food and oil prices world- wide and a tottering international financial system, some lawmakers have embarked on a high-profile campaign to ram through a population control-driven bill that threatens the sanctity of human life, family life and marriage, without regard to their honored place in our Constitution and our Christian culture.
The population has many problems. But population is not itself the problem. Assuming there are problems associated with population growth, the reproductive health bill does not provide any answers. I hope the following will help put this bill to rest and allow the nation to devote its time, energy and resources to its real and more pressing problems.
1. THE BILL IS BASED ON A FLAWED PREMISE.
There is no “population explosion” and the country is not overpopulated.
The population growth rate and the total fertility rate (TFR) have declined. The National Statistics Office puts the growth rate at 2.04 %, the TFR at 3.02. However, the CIA World Factbook (2008), for one, puts the growth rate at 1.728%, the TFR at 3.00. Whatever the real numbers are, at least one million Filipinos leave the country for foreign jobs every year. There are at least 12 million Filipinos now living and working abroad.
The country has a population density of 277 Filipinos per square km, with a GDP per capita (purchasing power parity) of $,3400. The Central African Republic has a population density of 6.5 and a GDP per capita (PPP) of $700. At least 50 countries have a much lower population density than that of the Philippines, yet their GDP per capita is also much lower.
Fact: the few are not always richer.
On the other hand, at least 36 countries have a much higher population density than that of the Philippines, yet their GDP per capita is also much higher. Macau has 18,428 people per square km and a GDP per capita of $28,400; Monaco has 16,754 people per square km, with a per capita income of $30,000; Hong Kong has 6,407 per square km, and a per capita income of $42,000; and Singapore has 6,489 per square km., and a per capita income of $49,700.
Fact: the many are not always poorer.
The most critical statistic has to do with the age structure of the population. Worldwide, the median age is 27.4 years. In the Philippines, it is 23 years. In at least 139 countries it is higher than 23; in 73 others, lower. All the developed countries are on the high side. Monaco has the highest (45.5 years), followed by Japan (43.8), Germany (43.4), Italy (42.9), Sweden (41.3), Spain (40.7), Switzerland (40.7), Holland (40), United Kingdom (39.9), France (39.2), Singapore (38.4), Russia (38.3), United States (36.7), South Korea (36.4). In China, the world’s fastest growing economy, it is 33.6.
This means a Filipino has more years to be productive than his counterpart in the developed world, where the population is graying and dying, without adequate replacement because of negative birth rates. Those who understand this well will tend to be more confident of the future; they will see the need to invest more extensively in the development of this resource.
2. THE BILL IS TOTALLY UNNECESSARY.
Except for the purported objective of treating infertility and preventing abortion, which (if government is serious) may be immediately addressed by secondary health policy, the things the bill wants to do are already being done, whether legally or not.
Officially-sponsored contraception and sterilization are ongoing with foreign and local funding, even without a legal mandate. Punishable abortions go unpunished.. Certain things that are lawful and necessary (like promotion of breast-feeding, infant and child health and nutrition) can be done easily without legislation. Some truly repugnant things (like mandatory sex education for young children, inclusion of contraceptives and abortifacients in the National Drug Formulary as essential medicines, and making a family planning compliance certificate from the civil registrar a requirement for marriage) should not be legislated at all.
There is free access to information on contraception. No law bars anyone from using contraceptives of their choice, it is a free market. You don’t need the government for it. Consumers however must pay for their own, as they pay for everything else. The Philippines is not a welfare state, nobody gets a free lunch. If the government has the money, it should spend it to save women from killer-diseases, not on trying to cure pregnancy, which is not a disease.
At least 80 women are said to die from heart diseases everyday; 63 from vascular diseases; 51 from cancer; 45 from pneumonia; 23 from tuberculosis; 22 from diabetes; 16 from lower chronic respiratory diseases. This is where the State should provide, if it could, free medicine and medical services.
Now, out of every 100,000 live births, some 107 women are said to die from complications during childbirth. This is 107 too many. But the local executives of Gattaran, Cagayan and Sorsogon City have shown that maternal death during childbirth could be brought down to zero simply by providing women with adequate basic and emergency obstetric care facilities and skilled medical services. Not contraceptives.
On July 29, 2005, the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that after a thorough review of the published scientific literature, it was concluded that oral contraceptives are carcinogenic to humans ---they cause breast, liver and cervical cancer. In light of that, the government should probably ban the carcinogens or at least label them as “cancer-causing,” or “dangerous to women’s health.” But some legislators, some of them doctors too, still want to distribute them as “essential medicines” to our women. Why?
3. THE BILL ASSUMES THAT THE STATE IS OMNIPOTENT. IT SEEKS TO CONFER UPON THE STATE A RIGHT AND AUTHORITY IT DOES NOT, AND CAN NEVER, POSSESS.
No one questions the right of the State to levy taxes, to expropriate private property for public use, to conscript able-bodied young men for its defense. But the State may not enter the family bedroom and tell married couples how to practice marital love.
For while it is a citizen who casts his vote, pays his taxes and fights for his flag, it is a man who embraces his wife and fathers her child. There are certain areas, certain activities of man as man where every individual is accountable only to God, and completely autonomous from the State. These are sacred and inviolate areas where the State may not intrude.
Allow the State to invade our innermost private lives, and it will just be a matter of time before we are told we can no longer breathe unless the State allows it.
4. THE BILL IS PATENTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
a) Article II, Section 12 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.”
“Sanctity”---the state of being holy---is an attribute of God. God is not outside our lives; the very first words of the Constitution proclaim it: “We, the sovereign Filipino People, imploring the aid of Almighty God…” Obedience to God’s laws, therefore, is not only a solemn teaching of the Church, but also an express constitutional mandate.
The government cannot be party to a program that seeks to prevent one married woman from conceiving, without making a mockery of that mandate. That is the necessary implication of the State’s duty to “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.”
b). Article XV recognizes “marriage as an inviolable social institution,” and “the foundation of the family.” Which, in turn, the State recognizes as “the foundation of the nation.” Section 3 (1) of the same Article binds the State to defend “the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.”
Clearly, this does not allow the State to tell members of any faith ---in this case the Catholic faith---not to listen to what their Church teaches on faith and morals, or responsible parenthood, but to listen to the politicians and the population controllers instead.
But this is precisely what the bill seeks to do.
5. THE BILL IS DESTRUCTIVE OF PUBLIC MORALS AND FAMILY VALUES.
It seeks to legislate a hedonistic sex-oriented lifestyle whose aim is to assure couples and everybody else of “a safe and satisfying sex life” (the other term for contraceptive sex), instead of a mutually fulfilling conjugal life, and ultimately change time-honored Filipino values about human life, family life, marriage, in favor of the most destructive counter-values that are wreaking havoc on the morals of many consumerist societies.
6. THE BILL IS PARTICULARLY UNJUST TO CATHOLIC TAXPAYERS, WHO CONSTITUTE THE MAJORITY, AND WHO WILL BE MADE TO BEAR THE COST OF THE PROGRAM THAT WILL ULTIMATELY ATTACK A CONSTANTLY HELD DOCTRINE OF THEIR FAITH.
The same objection would hold even if the affected party were a religious minority. In fact, it should be interesting to find out whether any legislator will dare propose any legislation that is doctrinally and morally offensive to Islam or to any politically active local religious group.
7. THE BILL IS NOT WHAT ITS AUTHORS SAY IT IS. IT IS EVERYTHING THEY SAY IT IS NOT.
Not only is it hedonistic, it is above all eugenicist. It seeks to eliminate the poor and the “socially unfit” while paying lip service to their cause. While it neither mandates a two-child family nor legalizes abortion, it prepares the ground for both.
Its declared objective of population reduction conforms to the global population policy launched by U.S. National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200 in 1974, under the title IMPLICATIONS OF WORLDWIDE POPULATION GROWTH FOR U.S. SECURITY AND OVERSEAS INTERESTS. It targeted the Philippines, along with India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Columbia.
NSSM 200, also known as The Kissinger Report, called for a two-child family worldwide by the year 2000, using universal contraception and abortion. “No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion,” the Report said. In 1974, NSSM 200 estimated thirty million abortions worldwide. The annual rate has doubled since.
The U.S. legalized abortion in 1973 in the Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade. Since then the abortion campaign has not abated. The 1974 international conference on population in Bucharest, on the eve of NSSM 200, had since been followed by the international conference in Mexico in 1984, the Cairo conference in 1994, the Beijing conference on Women in 1995, and all the other international conferences which tried to push abortion as a method of family planning, whether the subject of the conference was food, housing, or environment.
At the United Nations, the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) Committee continues to exert pressure on party nations to legalize abortion or increase access to abortion. From 1995 to 200, 65 party nations were so pressured, according to a 2008 document. These included the Philippines whose delegate (Health Undersecretary Nieto) was told by the Committee Member from Croatia, China and Ghana in 2006 to decriminalize abortion and put aside religious considerations and its “unrealistic approach” to abortion.
8. ENACTMENT OF THE BILL WILL ONLY DEEPEN THE IGNORANCE ABOUT THE ISSUES INVOLVED.
Some defenders of the bill claim that nine out of ten women (who must be Catholic) want to contracept, regardless of what the Church teaches about it. Sad, but if the claim is correct, then nine out of ten “Catholic” women need to be instructed more deeply on the doctrines of their faith and on the harmful effects of contraceptives and abortifacients. Not everything an individual wants is good or right; the truth is never the result of opinion surveys. Contraception is wrong not because the Church has banned it; the Church has banned it because it is wrong. No amount of surveys can change that.
The authors of the bill suggest that Catholics need not follow what the bishops are saying because Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on the regulation of birth, is not an infallible document. This is an unfortunate conclusion from an incomplete premise.
Church teaching on contraception did not begin with Paul VI. Onan’s case (Gen 38:8-10) is absolute proof; Pius XI and Pius XII pronounced on it before Humanae Vitae, appealing to Scripture, to the Fathers of the Church, and to tradition. While Humanae Vitae was not infallibly proposed, its teaching has been held definitively by all Catholic bishops. It meets the criteria set forth by Vatican II for an infallible exercise of the ordinary magisterium of the bishops throughout the world. As the theologian Russell Shaw points out, the Church has always taught contraception to be gravely sinful; she has never taught that it is good, permissible, or even only venially sinful.
9. THE NATURAL REGULATION OF CONCEPTIONS DOES NOT OFFEND THE CONSTITUTION OR THE RELIGIOUS BELIEF OF ANY COUPLE; IT IS IN FULL ACCORD WITH THE DEMANDS OF RESPONSIBLE PARENTHOOD, AND IS NOT CONTRACEPTION AT ALL. NO LAW IS NEEDED FOR THE STATE TO SUPPORT IT.
The Billings Method, which takes advantage of the fertility rhythm of the human body, has been attested by the WHO to be 99% effective. But as there is no money in it, no industry has promoted it like the various contraceptives and abortifacients. State support for it could spell the difference.
(Former Senator Francisco S. Tatad represents Asia-Pacific on the Governing Boards of International Right to Life Federation, Cincinnati, Ohio, and World Youth Alliance, New York, NY.)
7 August 2008
The population has many problems. But population is not itself the problem. Assuming there are problems associated with population growth, the reproductive health bill does not provide any answers. I hope the following will help put this bill to rest and allow the nation to devote its time, energy and resources to its real and more pressing problems.
1. THE BILL IS BASED ON A FLAWED PREMISE.
There is no “population explosion” and the country is not overpopulated.
The population growth rate and the total fertility rate (TFR) have declined. The National Statistics Office puts the growth rate at 2.04 %, the TFR at 3.02. However, the CIA World Factbook (2008), for one, puts the growth rate at 1.728%, the TFR at 3.00. Whatever the real numbers are, at least one million Filipinos leave the country for foreign jobs every year. There are at least 12 million Filipinos now living and working abroad.
The country has a population density of 277 Filipinos per square km, with a GDP per capita (purchasing power parity) of $,3400. The Central African Republic has a population density of 6.5 and a GDP per capita (PPP) of $700. At least 50 countries have a much lower population density than that of the Philippines, yet their GDP per capita is also much lower.
Fact: the few are not always richer.
On the other hand, at least 36 countries have a much higher population density than that of the Philippines, yet their GDP per capita is also much higher. Macau has 18,428 people per square km and a GDP per capita of $28,400; Monaco has 16,754 people per square km, with a per capita income of $30,000; Hong Kong has 6,407 per square km, and a per capita income of $42,000; and Singapore has 6,489 per square km., and a per capita income of $49,700.
Fact: the many are not always poorer.
The most critical statistic has to do with the age structure of the population. Worldwide, the median age is 27.4 years. In the Philippines, it is 23 years. In at least 139 countries it is higher than 23; in 73 others, lower. All the developed countries are on the high side. Monaco has the highest (45.5 years), followed by Japan (43.8), Germany (43.4), Italy (42.9), Sweden (41.3), Spain (40.7), Switzerland (40.7), Holland (40), United Kingdom (39.9), France (39.2), Singapore (38.4), Russia (38.3), United States (36.7), South Korea (36.4). In China, the world’s fastest growing economy, it is 33.6.
This means a Filipino has more years to be productive than his counterpart in the developed world, where the population is graying and dying, without adequate replacement because of negative birth rates. Those who understand this well will tend to be more confident of the future; they will see the need to invest more extensively in the development of this resource.
2. THE BILL IS TOTALLY UNNECESSARY.
Except for the purported objective of treating infertility and preventing abortion, which (if government is serious) may be immediately addressed by secondary health policy, the things the bill wants to do are already being done, whether legally or not.
Officially-sponsored contraception and sterilization are ongoing with foreign and local funding, even without a legal mandate. Punishable abortions go unpunished.. Certain things that are lawful and necessary (like promotion of breast-feeding, infant and child health and nutrition) can be done easily without legislation. Some truly repugnant things (like mandatory sex education for young children, inclusion of contraceptives and abortifacients in the National Drug Formulary as essential medicines, and making a family planning compliance certificate from the civil registrar a requirement for marriage) should not be legislated at all.
There is free access to information on contraception. No law bars anyone from using contraceptives of their choice, it is a free market. You don’t need the government for it. Consumers however must pay for their own, as they pay for everything else. The Philippines is not a welfare state, nobody gets a free lunch. If the government has the money, it should spend it to save women from killer-diseases, not on trying to cure pregnancy, which is not a disease.
At least 80 women are said to die from heart diseases everyday; 63 from vascular diseases; 51 from cancer; 45 from pneumonia; 23 from tuberculosis; 22 from diabetes; 16 from lower chronic respiratory diseases. This is where the State should provide, if it could, free medicine and medical services.
Now, out of every 100,000 live births, some 107 women are said to die from complications during childbirth. This is 107 too many. But the local executives of Gattaran, Cagayan and Sorsogon City have shown that maternal death during childbirth could be brought down to zero simply by providing women with adequate basic and emergency obstetric care facilities and skilled medical services. Not contraceptives.
On July 29, 2005, the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that after a thorough review of the published scientific literature, it was concluded that oral contraceptives are carcinogenic to humans ---they cause breast, liver and cervical cancer. In light of that, the government should probably ban the carcinogens or at least label them as “cancer-causing,” or “dangerous to women’s health.” But some legislators, some of them doctors too, still want to distribute them as “essential medicines” to our women. Why?
3. THE BILL ASSUMES THAT THE STATE IS OMNIPOTENT. IT SEEKS TO CONFER UPON THE STATE A RIGHT AND AUTHORITY IT DOES NOT, AND CAN NEVER, POSSESS.
No one questions the right of the State to levy taxes, to expropriate private property for public use, to conscript able-bodied young men for its defense. But the State may not enter the family bedroom and tell married couples how to practice marital love.
For while it is a citizen who casts his vote, pays his taxes and fights for his flag, it is a man who embraces his wife and fathers her child. There are certain areas, certain activities of man as man where every individual is accountable only to God, and completely autonomous from the State. These are sacred and inviolate areas where the State may not intrude.
Allow the State to invade our innermost private lives, and it will just be a matter of time before we are told we can no longer breathe unless the State allows it.
4. THE BILL IS PATENTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
a) Article II, Section 12 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.”
“Sanctity”---the state of being holy---is an attribute of God. God is not outside our lives; the very first words of the Constitution proclaim it: “We, the sovereign Filipino People, imploring the aid of Almighty God…” Obedience to God’s laws, therefore, is not only a solemn teaching of the Church, but also an express constitutional mandate.
The government cannot be party to a program that seeks to prevent one married woman from conceiving, without making a mockery of that mandate. That is the necessary implication of the State’s duty to “equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.”
b). Article XV recognizes “marriage as an inviolable social institution,” and “the foundation of the family.” Which, in turn, the State recognizes as “the foundation of the nation.” Section 3 (1) of the same Article binds the State to defend “the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.”
Clearly, this does not allow the State to tell members of any faith ---in this case the Catholic faith---not to listen to what their Church teaches on faith and morals, or responsible parenthood, but to listen to the politicians and the population controllers instead.
But this is precisely what the bill seeks to do.
5. THE BILL IS DESTRUCTIVE OF PUBLIC MORALS AND FAMILY VALUES.
It seeks to legislate a hedonistic sex-oriented lifestyle whose aim is to assure couples and everybody else of “a safe and satisfying sex life” (the other term for contraceptive sex), instead of a mutually fulfilling conjugal life, and ultimately change time-honored Filipino values about human life, family life, marriage, in favor of the most destructive counter-values that are wreaking havoc on the morals of many consumerist societies.
6. THE BILL IS PARTICULARLY UNJUST TO CATHOLIC TAXPAYERS, WHO CONSTITUTE THE MAJORITY, AND WHO WILL BE MADE TO BEAR THE COST OF THE PROGRAM THAT WILL ULTIMATELY ATTACK A CONSTANTLY HELD DOCTRINE OF THEIR FAITH.
The same objection would hold even if the affected party were a religious minority. In fact, it should be interesting to find out whether any legislator will dare propose any legislation that is doctrinally and morally offensive to Islam or to any politically active local religious group.
7. THE BILL IS NOT WHAT ITS AUTHORS SAY IT IS. IT IS EVERYTHING THEY SAY IT IS NOT.
Not only is it hedonistic, it is above all eugenicist. It seeks to eliminate the poor and the “socially unfit” while paying lip service to their cause. While it neither mandates a two-child family nor legalizes abortion, it prepares the ground for both.
Its declared objective of population reduction conforms to the global population policy launched by U.S. National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200 in 1974, under the title IMPLICATIONS OF WORLDWIDE POPULATION GROWTH FOR U.S. SECURITY AND OVERSEAS INTERESTS. It targeted the Philippines, along with India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Columbia.
NSSM 200, also known as The Kissinger Report, called for a two-child family worldwide by the year 2000, using universal contraception and abortion. “No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion,” the Report said. In 1974, NSSM 200 estimated thirty million abortions worldwide. The annual rate has doubled since.
The U.S. legalized abortion in 1973 in the Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade. Since then the abortion campaign has not abated. The 1974 international conference on population in Bucharest, on the eve of NSSM 200, had since been followed by the international conference in Mexico in 1984, the Cairo conference in 1994, the Beijing conference on Women in 1995, and all the other international conferences which tried to push abortion as a method of family planning, whether the subject of the conference was food, housing, or environment.
At the United Nations, the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) Committee continues to exert pressure on party nations to legalize abortion or increase access to abortion. From 1995 to 200, 65 party nations were so pressured, according to a 2008 document. These included the Philippines whose delegate (Health Undersecretary Nieto) was told by the Committee Member from Croatia, China and Ghana in 2006 to decriminalize abortion and put aside religious considerations and its “unrealistic approach” to abortion.
8. ENACTMENT OF THE BILL WILL ONLY DEEPEN THE IGNORANCE ABOUT THE ISSUES INVOLVED.
Some defenders of the bill claim that nine out of ten women (who must be Catholic) want to contracept, regardless of what the Church teaches about it. Sad, but if the claim is correct, then nine out of ten “Catholic” women need to be instructed more deeply on the doctrines of their faith and on the harmful effects of contraceptives and abortifacients. Not everything an individual wants is good or right; the truth is never the result of opinion surveys. Contraception is wrong not because the Church has banned it; the Church has banned it because it is wrong. No amount of surveys can change that.
The authors of the bill suggest that Catholics need not follow what the bishops are saying because Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on the regulation of birth, is not an infallible document. This is an unfortunate conclusion from an incomplete premise.
Church teaching on contraception did not begin with Paul VI. Onan’s case (Gen 38:8-10) is absolute proof; Pius XI and Pius XII pronounced on it before Humanae Vitae, appealing to Scripture, to the Fathers of the Church, and to tradition. While Humanae Vitae was not infallibly proposed, its teaching has been held definitively by all Catholic bishops. It meets the criteria set forth by Vatican II for an infallible exercise of the ordinary magisterium of the bishops throughout the world. As the theologian Russell Shaw points out, the Church has always taught contraception to be gravely sinful; she has never taught that it is good, permissible, or even only venially sinful.
9. THE NATURAL REGULATION OF CONCEPTIONS DOES NOT OFFEND THE CONSTITUTION OR THE RELIGIOUS BELIEF OF ANY COUPLE; IT IS IN FULL ACCORD WITH THE DEMANDS OF RESPONSIBLE PARENTHOOD, AND IS NOT CONTRACEPTION AT ALL. NO LAW IS NEEDED FOR THE STATE TO SUPPORT IT.
The Billings Method, which takes advantage of the fertility rhythm of the human body, has been attested by the WHO to be 99% effective. But as there is no money in it, no industry has promoted it like the various contraceptives and abortifacients. State support for it could spell the difference.
(Former Senator Francisco S. Tatad represents Asia-Pacific on the Governing Boards of International Right to Life Federation, Cincinnati, Ohio, and World Youth Alliance, New York, NY.)
7 August 2008
Monday, August 4, 2008
GMA WALKS THE TIGHT ROPE
The State of the Nation Address (SONA) is an annual political event in which the President tries to do a major selling job at the opening of every regular session of Congress. He or she has to sell every failure as a success, and every small success as a great one. It is for us, citizens, to buy what is being sold or not.
So everything is scripted, from the speech to the applause, to the tv camera angles, to the favorable reviews from friendly sources. The only thing the speaker is unable to script is the weather (unless the air force decides to seed the clouds to rain out protesters), and the heckling from the hostile crowd. That, however, can always be predicted.
No sooner is the President finished speaking than the critics take turns to offer their own “true state of the nation.” The usual result is a torrent of words which create their own headlines but offer nothing really that can cook the rice.
This year’s SONA was no different from previous ones except perhaps in one respect. It was preceded by an alleged survey showing how low President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s approval rating had reportedly plunged. Local political surveys are either actual and honest or rigged. Yet whatever they are, they have become the nation’s substitute for serious thinking and analysis. And this one showed Mrs. Arroyo at the bottom of the pit.
But if it was meant to discourage Mrs. Arroyo from giving herself good grades, it did not. She praised herself for reportedly taking steps to prepare for the global food and energy prices, otherwise we would have been completely sunk. And she recounted with pride her having disbursed billions of pesos as doleouts to the poor, even without an enabling law from Congress. She refused to submit to the rising demand that she scrap the Value Added Tax (VAT) on oil to ease the burden on consumers. Then she gave her vote of confidence to natural family planning in the face of a concerted move to steamroll a highly objectionable reproductive health bill in the House of Representatives.
The real test for Mrs. Arroyo has just begun. We shall see what happens if and when her Congress allies, prodded by their foreign friends, insist on ramming through the repro health bill which seeks to legalize the state contraceptives program and mandatory sex education for young children which, unbeknownst to most Filipinos, have been going on illegally for years. Although many of the congressmen are eating pork out of the President’s hands, they have their own allegiance to the foreign population control lobby, which has been trying to legalize the killing of unborn children worldwide since the seventies.
The repro health bill owes its origin to the World Population Plan of Action launched by the United States through its 1974 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, entitled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” Also known as “The Kissinger Report,” NSSM 200 called for drastic fertility reduction in at least 13 developing countries, including the Philippines. It was kept a secret document from 1974 to July 3, 1989, when it was officially declassified and released by the White House. You can download it now in the internet.
The global target of a two-child family continues to be promoted actively in the poor countries, using “progressive-minded” activists and one-eyed “nationalists” who normally protest foreign political intervention in their country’s sovereignty, but not this most insidious meddling in shaping the lives of their families.
The concerted effort to steamroll the repro bill in the House comes after the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Committee in the United Nations tried to pressure the Philippines to change its laws against abortion, along with 64 other countries which had been so pressured.
The present bill is not about abortion yet, but prepares the ground for it. The bill is an attempt to legalize ongoing official contraception, whose aim is to reduce fertility. But as NSSM 200 says so emphatically, “no country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.” NSSM 200 estimated 30 million abortions around the world every year, as of 1974. That figure has grown since.
Right now, Mrs. Arroyo has to walk the tight rope. But eventually, she will have to decide clearly and firmly, whether to uphold the Constitution, the moral law and the laws of God, or to allow this persistent racist doctrine of population control to colonize the minds of her people, long after they had rejected the colonization of their land by the imperial powers.
So everything is scripted, from the speech to the applause, to the tv camera angles, to the favorable reviews from friendly sources. The only thing the speaker is unable to script is the weather (unless the air force decides to seed the clouds to rain out protesters), and the heckling from the hostile crowd. That, however, can always be predicted.
No sooner is the President finished speaking than the critics take turns to offer their own “true state of the nation.” The usual result is a torrent of words which create their own headlines but offer nothing really that can cook the rice.
This year’s SONA was no different from previous ones except perhaps in one respect. It was preceded by an alleged survey showing how low President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s approval rating had reportedly plunged. Local political surveys are either actual and honest or rigged. Yet whatever they are, they have become the nation’s substitute for serious thinking and analysis. And this one showed Mrs. Arroyo at the bottom of the pit.
But if it was meant to discourage Mrs. Arroyo from giving herself good grades, it did not. She praised herself for reportedly taking steps to prepare for the global food and energy prices, otherwise we would have been completely sunk. And she recounted with pride her having disbursed billions of pesos as doleouts to the poor, even without an enabling law from Congress. She refused to submit to the rising demand that she scrap the Value Added Tax (VAT) on oil to ease the burden on consumers. Then she gave her vote of confidence to natural family planning in the face of a concerted move to steamroll a highly objectionable reproductive health bill in the House of Representatives.
The real test for Mrs. Arroyo has just begun. We shall see what happens if and when her Congress allies, prodded by their foreign friends, insist on ramming through the repro health bill which seeks to legalize the state contraceptives program and mandatory sex education for young children which, unbeknownst to most Filipinos, have been going on illegally for years. Although many of the congressmen are eating pork out of the President’s hands, they have their own allegiance to the foreign population control lobby, which has been trying to legalize the killing of unborn children worldwide since the seventies.
The repro health bill owes its origin to the World Population Plan of Action launched by the United States through its 1974 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, entitled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” Also known as “The Kissinger Report,” NSSM 200 called for drastic fertility reduction in at least 13 developing countries, including the Philippines. It was kept a secret document from 1974 to July 3, 1989, when it was officially declassified and released by the White House. You can download it now in the internet.
The global target of a two-child family continues to be promoted actively in the poor countries, using “progressive-minded” activists and one-eyed “nationalists” who normally protest foreign political intervention in their country’s sovereignty, but not this most insidious meddling in shaping the lives of their families.
The concerted effort to steamroll the repro bill in the House comes after the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Committee in the United Nations tried to pressure the Philippines to change its laws against abortion, along with 64 other countries which had been so pressured.
The present bill is not about abortion yet, but prepares the ground for it. The bill is an attempt to legalize ongoing official contraception, whose aim is to reduce fertility. But as NSSM 200 says so emphatically, “no country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.” NSSM 200 estimated 30 million abortions around the world every year, as of 1974. That figure has grown since.
Right now, Mrs. Arroyo has to walk the tight rope. But eventually, she will have to decide clearly and firmly, whether to uphold the Constitution, the moral law and the laws of God, or to allow this persistent racist doctrine of population control to colonize the minds of her people, long after they had rejected the colonization of their land by the imperial powers.
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