Religion and politics

All of Cebu’s Lower House solons but Rep. Tomas Osmeña of Cebu City’s south district have expressed their opposition to and intention to vote against the Reproductive Health bill once it is put to a vote in the House plenary.

Rep. Pastor Alcover of party-list Alliance for Nationalism and Democracy said he will vote against the bill. So did Rep. Luigi Quisumbing of Cebu’s 6th district, though both manifested their intentions days after Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma invited local and national leaders to lunch last Saturday to thank them for their stance against the bill.

Was the luncheon a case of ecclesiastical intrusion into the affairs of the State? Many advocates want to think so in their eagerness to paint the portrait of a Church that is out of step with the times and incapable of reasoned argument.

Yet if one goes beyond the noisier personalities fighting the RH bill or even the effectively nonexistent ghouls of bishops threatening their flocks with excommunication (Tandag Bishop Nereo Odchimar, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, said he never threatened President Benigno Aquino III with excommunication months ago and it was only P-Noy who brought up the topic in a speech at this year’s University of the Philippines Diliman commencement rites), one can see that opposition to the RH bill is ultimately rooted not only in Catholic but also in anthropological arguments—arguments based on the dignity of the human being.

There is already consensus in principle between the Church and the State with regard to the defense of human life from womb to tomb. The 1987 Philippine Constitution protects the life of a mother and a human being from the moment of conception to natural death.

(A bill to protect those in the womb is even being deliberated upon in the Senate).

So it is only logical for the Church and others who oppose the RH bill to question its provisions on the promotion “without bias” of all forms of family planning including modern (artificial) methods, especially on account of the dangers to women, mothers and newly conceived human beings that the modern methods like chemical contraceptives and intrauterine devices pose (plus the sexually transmitted infections that barrier methods like condoms do not really protect sexually active persons from).

For the Church and others opposed to the RH bill, a state truly concerned about the health of women may as well launch an investigation into the harmful consequences of chemical contraceptives like cancer and of IUDs like lacerated wombs and expelled fetuses, considering that these have proliferated in the country and therefore victimized our women since the sexual revolution was triggered in the West in the 1960s.

That the state may as well crack down on abortion quack doctors and doctors who apparently kill tens of thousands in a silent holocaust in this land each year. (Evidence is aplenty with periodic reports of fetuses turning up in the most unlikely places.)

That a caring state should also regard condom distribution with healthy skepticism, considering that it has not made a big dent on HIV-AIDS-ridden Africa.