HOLD YOUR GROUND, DON’T GIVE an inch.

This in effect was the advice that former Health Secretary Alberto Romualdez gave lawmakers in calling on them not to compromise with Catholic bishops on the consolidated reproductive health bill pending in Congress.

“I don’t think that’s an issue that the Church should interfere with. That’s a social and economic policy, which is purely the business of the government. I don’t think the Church should even say anything about that,” Romualdez said yesterday in an interview after a press forum in Quezon City.

“Why should the House and the Senate negotiate with the Church on a social issue?” he said.

Romualdez, who served as health secretary of then President Joseph Estrada, said he agreed with the intent of the proposed legislation.

“My own position is, if we want to have a sensible population management program, it should be one that is aimed at reducing our population growth rate to zero. That can be done only with a two-child policy [that can be implemented for 10 to 15 years],” he said.

Romualdez never got to implement a program to increase the budget for the purchase of contraceptives and promote a two-child policy after Estrada was toppled in 2001.

Vaudeville of misinformation

Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, principal author of the reproductive health bill pending in the House of Representatives, scoffed at the announcement of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ Commission on Family and Life that backers of the measure would not be welcome to attend the prayer rally planned on July 25.

“If the organizers of the prayer rally on the Filipino family do not welcome reproductive health and family planning advocates, then that is their call and discretion,” Lagman said.

“We do not intend to gatecrash this vaudeville of misinformation. It is, however, disheartening that those who claim to be purveyors of truth are in fact peddling misinformation,” he said.

Lagman said he had gotten a copy of the “Manifesto of Filipino Families,” which is to be read and circulated on July 25.

According to the lawmaker, the manifesto contains misinformation, including claims that Congress is railroading the bill, and that laws on reproductive health lead to abortion.

“This is completely untrue. On the contrary, a rational and comprehensive national policy on family planning, which includes contraceptive use, reduces significantly the rate of abortion, as documented by international studies,” Lagman said.

“Consequently, there is no need to legalize abortion if there is an increased usage of modern and effective contraceptives,” he said.

Convenience

The Church has been pulling out all the stops to block the approval of the reproductive health bill, which has been passed at the committee level in the House.

In a statement e-mailed from Hong Kong, activist priest Robert Reyes said convenience was fueling the fresh debate between Catholic bishops and lawmakers over population management.

Reyes said that because Pope Benedict XVI was concerned about the “fast-spreading culture of death,” the debate had become a “timely and convenient issue” for the bishops to show support for him.

“In like manner, the population controversy gives a bishop-friendly President a convenient opportunity to give and show her support to her bishop-friends, as a sign of her profound gratitude,” Reyes said.

And since President Macapagal-Arroyo is friendly to the bishops, lobbying against “prochoice” and “antilife” bills in Congress has become “easy and quite convenient,” he added.

Poor not heard

“In all these, those who suffer the most are not heard,” said Reyes, the “running priest” who now works for the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong.

The poor who have to contend daily with spiraling prices of food and fuel are lost in the atmosphere of convenience, he said.

Reyes said everyone should “develop the fine moral sensitivity to see and sense what is behind the current controversy.”

“While big words like ‘life,’ ‘conscience’ and ‘law’ are being bandied about, an imp, a little pesky god called convenience, is romping about. The focus on population and threats of excommunication are convenient tools favoring those it means to favor, which unfortunately do not include the poor,” he said.

And while the protagonists in the debate are being heard, many poor women will “quietly use contraceptives and resort to abortions (induced and spontaneous),” Reyes said.

He added: “While the former continue to bow before the little god of convenience, the poor, who yet need to experience and know her, will find a way, whatever way, to live or even just barely to survive.”