Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago
Elementary school textbooks will not contain graphic images of the sex act once the Reproductive Health (RH) bill that provides “age- and development-appropriate” education is passed into law.
Senator Miriam Santiago gave this assurance as the Senate revived debates on the controversial bill.
When it was Senator Antonio Trillanes IV’s turn to interpellate on Tuesday, he categorically asked Santiago, cosponsor of the RH bill, whether textbooks “would… include visual representations of sexual intercourse.”
The question was raised after Santiago said that “age- and development-appropriate” RH education would begin at fifth grade based on the bill’s provisions.
Santiago, who was initially taken aback by the question, laughed and said, “sexual intercourse might be difficult to depict in the form of pictures.”
She added that should a textbook provide an image, “it would be a euphemistic drawing or photograph. But it will not be explicit.”
Trillanes said he raised this concern after learning that parents in China and Australia are up in arms after discovering “graphic representations of sexual acts… displayed to the children as part of [their RH] education.”
Santiago assured, however, that such cannot be the case in the Philippines where the population is composed of “85 percent Catholic.”
Originally posted at 03:43 pm | Wednesday, March 07, 2012