Sotto accuses groups of promoting abortion

Senate Majority Floor Leader Vicente Sotto III. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Senate majority leader Tito Sotto alleged on Wednesday that at least four non-government organizations presenting themselves as “pro-women” receive funding from international groups advocating abortion.

In the second salvo of his series against the Reproductive Health bill, Sotto charged that international organizations including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have programs targeting developing countries that aim to reduce their populations.

In a speech delivered before a fully packed Senate gallery, Sotto named the local NGOs as the Family Planning Organization of the Philippines (FPOP), Reproductive Health Advocacy Network (RHAN), its affiliate LIKHAAN and the Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines, which actively participated in hearings on the RH bill.

Among those in the gallery was former Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral who, just on Tuesday, asked Sotto to produce the death certificate of his infant son whom the senator said was conceived despite the contraceptives his wife took.

Cabral said contraceptives could not be responsible for the “weak heart” suffered by Sotto’s son but the senator insisted otherwise.

Sotto said he would give Cabral a copy of the death certificate.

“I would like to take exception to the statements made by Dr. Cabral and to a certain extent by Congresswoman Garin, in reaction to my disclosure and confession on the death of my first son, Vincent Paul. I find their statements callous and insensitive and it is unfortunate that the reproductive health debate has come to this level. They should have given the sorrow of my family more respect,” he said in his speech.

In his speech, Sotto said the NGOs “want to make it appear that their interest is the health of our women. But my research showed that they have partnered with foreign organizations to acquaint our society with modern and liberal RH schemes.”

The senator charged that FPOP, in particular, received a subsidy of $625,095 “or almost P27.5M” in 2011 from the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

“FPOP’s website displays the organization’s support to the use of abortive facilities. In fact, the FPOP posted on its website an instructional brochure discussing different methods of abortion, depending on the weeks of pregnancy,” Sotto charged.

“Furthermore, FPOP’s website is linked to a website named Women on Waves which provides contacts to abortion clinics worldwide,” he added.

Sotto hammered on IPPF’s global agenda to promote abortion and the dissemination of contraceptives.

RHAN, on the other hand, even “submitted a budget proposal to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) containing a budget allocation for ‘nurturing legislators’ to expedite the passage of the RH Bill,” he said.

Sotto described RHAN’s affiliate, LIKHAAN as among the local groups “actively pushing for the RH bill.

“LIKHAAN openly supports abortion, as it features in its website step-by-step procedure on how to abort a baby. To make matters worse, the instructional material desperately intends to reach the Filipino masses by using Filipino language and putting pictures that clearly illustrate how to abort,” Sotto charged.

“In addition, there is a video featuring Dr. Junice Melgar, head of Likhaan who was quoted as saying, ‘If you are pro-women, you will have contacts to the services that are underground’ and whose other statements refer to abortion service providers,” he added.

“These organizations have such huge budgets so it’s not surprising that they have very active campaigns for the RH bill on radio, TV, print and especially the Internet,” Sotto noted.

“The strong pressure and the massive propaganda materials emanating from various groups cannot simply be put aside. They have been doing everything to impose their hidden agenda through the RH bill,” Sotto said.

He charged the DSWP of excluding unborn children in the definition of “children,” saying the group claimed that “calling the unborn a child is going beyond what the Constitution provides.”

“This organization further claims that only children have human rights, excepting the unborn,” Sotto said.

The senator blasted foreign organizations funding the local NGOs including the USAID, World Health  Organization, World  Bank  and  all  economic agencies whom he said “were given a directive to gear their policies and  programs towards  promoting  the  reduction  of  the  world’s population  especially in less developed countries” based on National Security Memorandum 200 issued by Henry Kissinger.

Sotto said Kissinger was “the source of the entire family planning, population and poverty-reduction programs of the US. All loans, grants and aid coming from the US and Western powers must be based on reduction of population through birth control.”

“Since the USAID is the principal instrument for the so-called development programs, there are NGOs and government agencies in the Philippines that have been contacted, supported  and  funded  by  it,” he added.

“These foreign organizations underhandedly seek to legalize abortion in countries where it is still a crime. And that I believe is exactly what they’re doing now in our country through this bill. This bill is a foreign-dictated policy, forcing us to adopt population control and abortion, contrary to the values that we uphold,” said the staunch anti-RH senator.

Sotto also questioned the claim of RH backers that 11 Filipino mothers die every day due to childbirth complications.

Sotto said he sent his staff to conduct a nationwide survey of government hospitals to verify this detail.

Instead of confirming this, however, Sotto said the Nueva Viscaya Provincial Hospital recorded only two maternal deaths for the entire 2011; the Pangasinan Provincial Hospital, 4; the Batangas Regional Hospital, 7 out of 2,584 deliveries, or .27 percent, last year. Meanwhile, the Cavite Naval Hospital recorded no maternal deaths for 2011 at all.

“If the National Statistics Coordinating Board cannot confirm their claim of 11 maternal deaths daily, where did the Department of Health get this? Is it possible that foreign organizations fed it this figure to use it to pressure lawmakers like us?” Sotto asked.

“I think it was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s hated propagandist, who said that a lie repeated several times would eventually be accepted as fact by the people,” he recalled.

“This is exactly what is happening now since several documents have pointed out that the so-called 11 maternal deaths a day in the Philippines is a canard and yet RH proponents continued to hoist it as gospel truth. I challenge the RH bill supporters to give me the names of faces of the 11 mothers who died in one particular day if they want me to believe in their claim,” Sotto dared.

The senator said an employee of the Senate secretariat who visited Uganda recently reported that the same claim of 11 maternal deaths daily was also being bandied in that country by NGOs.

The proponents of the bill also did not escape Sotto’s tirade as he observed that they “admitted that they sought the assistance of various non-government organizations specifically to learn about the effects of certain procedures or nuances of terminologies used in the bill. This in effect gave these organizations the opportunity to incorporate their distorted beliefs and principles in the bill.”—With Karen Boncocan, INQUIRER.net 

Originally posted at 10:01 pm | Wednesday, August 15, 2012