El Shaddai leader calls House population bill evil
By Juliet Labog-Javellana
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:47:00 07/23/2008
MANILA, Philippines—El Shaddai leader Bro. Mike Velarde Tuesday described the reproductive health (RH) bill pending in Congress as “evil” and warned that his Catholic charismatic group would take to the streets to oppose its passage.
Velarde claimed that the bill being vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church and “now being seriously pushed” by its authors in the House of Representatives was “pro-abortion and, to put it bluntly, a godless ideology.”
“If passed into law, it will put our country into a serious moral and economic bind. And according to the Holy Scripture, it will put our country into a cursed generation,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net).
Velarde is a spiritual adviser of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who has so far toed the Church line against artificial contraception.
According to Velarde, Sections 3, 10, 11 and 12 of the consolidated House bill titled “Reproductive Health and Population Development Act of 2008” promotes abortion and promiscuity and threatens to eliminate the Filipino race by promoting artificial birth control methods.
“We will stand firm on our advocacy and we will make our numbers felt when the time comes—when the bill is eventually deliberated on in Congress,” Velarde said.
“When the Senate caves in also, our recourse will be to go to Malacañang in numbers,” he said.
Velarde said an El Shaddai delegation would join the prayer rally against the RH bill organized by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines and scheduled on Friday. He said he would mobilize a rally of his own followers when the bill is put for approval in the House.
Education not control
The bill seeks to provide couples “an informed choice” and access to “a full range of safe, legal and effective family planning methods, techniques and devices.”
It says that while abortion remains a crime, “government shall ensure that women seeking care for post-abortion complications shall be treated and counseled in a humane, nonjudgmental and compassionate manner.”
Said Velarde: “Family planning per se is not bad policy, but the proposal to propagate and use tax money for artificial birth control methods is what makes the bill unacceptable.
“What we need now is, not population control, but appropriate education to make our people productive and prepare them for work both locally and internationally.”
He claimed that as crafted, the bill would “further corrupt the minds of our people, particularly the proposed sex education for very young school children.”
“It will also encourage abortion beyond our human imagination,” he said, adding:
Can’t be legislated
“People’s choice must not be legislated. Even God gives man a free choice. But as far as child-bearing is concerned, God has already decreed that we must choose life instead of death. God has decreed that we must increase, not decrease, our numbers as a people.”
Velarde said “it would be best for our country” if lawmakers “redirected their energies to look into the productive side of our population rather than the imagined negative impact of more and more people on the national economy.”
To the authors of the bill, he said: “If their mothers practiced family planning, we wouldn’t have (Albay Rep.) Edcel Lagman and (Iloilo Rep.) Janette Garin in Congress.”
Passage by December
Lagman, the chief proponent of the RH bill, hinted that there was no stopping it from being passed in the House despite strong opposition from Church leaders and other camps.
“The fact is that according to our priority calendar, it will have to be passed by December this year,” Lagman told the Inquirer.
He said later in a statement: “Religious orthodoxy should not consign women to unrelenting pregnancies and condemn poor families to hunger and penury across generations.”
Garin expressed optimism that Speaker Prospero Nograles would not yield to pressure from the Church.
Devout Catholic
Nograles had earlier disclosed to reporters that Davao Archbishop Fernando Capalla requested him to back the Church’s stand against the bill.
He said he had responded to Capalla’s request thus: “I’m a devout Catholic.”
Nograles refused to elaborate when asked if his response meant toeing the Church line. But he said he did not see Capalla’s request as a form of pressure.
In Lagman’s view, the Speaker’s statement was essentially “an endorsement of the [RH] bill.”
“That is the import of the statement,” Lagman said, pointing out that the denotative meaning of “Catholic” was “universal” or “all-embracing.”
“A genuinely devout Catholic is not a blind and unthinking Catholic,” Lagman said. “Being a Catholic means you are liberal and broad-minded. Its antonym is conservatism.”
Lagman said there were “so many devout Catholics” among the lawmakers backing the RH bill.
“I myself am a devout Catholic,” he said. “That’s between me and the Lord.”
Told that part of the nature of being a Catholic was fidelity to the Church’s social teachings, Lagman said: “It’s a growing Church, a progressive Church. Don’t stick to antediluvian dogmas.”
‘Nation’s best resource’
Velarde said the “intended effect” of the RH bill was “to stop population growth, reduce people on earth, and eventually banish humanity from the face of the earth.”
“If we Filipinos succumb to this evil ideology, we will be like the other countries which are now facing serious reproduction problems. They don’t want to bear children anymore, so their race is threatened. Their old generations are dying, with no one to man their economy and care for their elderly,” he said.
Velarde said manpower, if properly trained and provided opportunities, was the “best resource of a nation.”
“Our country is very rich in natural resources and can even sustain the rest of the world if managed and developed properly, and corruption is abated,” he said.
Velarde said the bill’s authors and supporters were barking up the wrong tree.
“It is easy to blame population because [leaders] have failed to provide for the population,” he said, responding to those who had challenged the bishops to see for themselves the effects of untrammeled population growth in Tondo, Manila.
“It is not the population that is to blame; it is the unwise management of our country by our leaders. Government has failed to manage our resources,” he said.
‘Wrong prescription’
According to Velarde, the RH bill is anti-health because it prescribes the use of artificial birth control methods that have “proven side effects on the health of the user and the unborn child.”
The bill “promotes promiscuity and free sex, and promotes medical assistance to abortionists,” and provides “a wrong economic prescription because government will use tax money for unproductive endeavors—to promote abortifacient birth control pills,” he said, adding:
“When population is reduced and eventually banished, what economic activity will prosper? Who will manage the economy? Who will work in the factories and offices and farms?”
The RH bill mandates the use of taxpayers’ money to fund the purchase of contraceptives and a mobile health care service for each congressional district to “deliver health care goods and services to its constituents” and promote “the full range of family planning methods, both natural and modern.”
It provides “mandatory age-appropriate reproductive health education” starting in the fifth grade up to fourth year high school.
To this, Velarde said: “We would be teaching the young to have sex.”
No compromise
CBCP legal counsel Jo Imbong said there could never be a common ground with lawmakers on the issue of the RH bill.
“This is a moral issue. There is no possibility of a compromise. We don’t compromise morality,” Imbong said on the phone.
Imbong said that while the CBCP agreed with lawmakers on the need to improve “human development,” curbing population growth by allowing widespread access to contraceptives was not the way to do it.
Opus Dei member Francisco Tatad called on lawmakers to dump the RH bill.
He said that if lawmakers were sincere in curbing maternal mortality, they should draft a bill addressing the matter.
“We can help draft a new bill addressing the issue of women’s health and the poverty issue because a lot of women get sick. The statistics are there. Most of them die because of cardiovascular or respiratory diseases, and cancer,” Tatad, a former senator, said at a forum.
He said the solution to maternal deaths was not artificial contraceptives but better health facilities.
Population council
Despite a possible backlash, Valenzuela Mayor Sherwin Gatchalian threw his support behind the RH bill.
“Any economist will agree that a key measure in poverty alleviation is population management,” Gatchalian told the Inquirer.
He made the comment after issuing an executive order reorganizing Valenzuela’s population council in the absence of a local ordinance on population control.
“We have at least 90 health workers going around the city to provide mothers adequate and correct information on their right to have safer pregnancies and on reproductive health services,” Gatchalian said.
He said the local government had allocated a yearly P5-million budget for the council.
Pro-quality life
The mayor said officials like himself who were backing population management were not advocating abortion.
“I’m pro-life, pro-quality life, and I’m open to discussion with anyone who will tell me otherwise,” he said. “How can one have quality of life when a family with many children can barely eat due to poverty?”
Gatchalian said he had witnessed how mothers flocked to health missions offering free ligation and lessons on the use of contraceptives.
“The women themselves submit to the methods because they want a better life for their family. It is the power of choice,” he said. With reports from Christian V. Esguerra, Kristine L. Alave and Nancy Carvajal
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