A vote for ‘no’

The hour of decision for congressmen, acting as individuals with a conscience, stretched past midnight.

Most of Cebu’s 11 representatives voted against the Reproductive Health bill.

It was expected group conduct, if you reckon their identity as sons and daughter of the oldest Catholic bedrock province in the country facing an election in a few months.

The tone comes plainly through in their choice of words explaining their vote, like the statement of the lone Cebuana Rep. Rachel Marguerite “Cutie” del Mar of Cebu City’s north district.

With no plans to seek reelection, she could afford to speak her mind without worrying too much about what the President would think of her stand or whether voters would agree.

How many other Cebuanas hold the same view?

Del Mar’s decision:

Let me explain my vote.

No other issue in recent years has divided the House more visibly and severely than its Reproductive Health Bill. The debate has pained many of us who must struggle to resolve the question amid clashing interests of government and church and of national welfare and individual conscience. Yet the debate must have also given my colleagues, as it has given me, richer understanding of the questions of law, morality, and faith that the controversial legislation has raised.

My decision, forged by the values I hold dear in my personal and professional life, is to vote NO.

[1] THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG when a bill disrespects basic religious belief and treats it as if it were separate — or could be separated — from the daily life of a Catholic believer who must live his faith, as if faith in God could be easily explained away in economic and demographic terms, and Catholic citizenry would just meekly submit;

[2] THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG when a bill reduces to a plain argument, and treats oh-so-lightly, the denial of the right to life of the unborn in the mother’s womb which is, to quote, “inherent in the right of a person”;

[3] THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG when a bill, willfully or not, mocks the revered authority of the Catholic Church, our Church, the Church to whom the great majority of Filipinos belong, by allowing and encouraging unrestricted sale, distribution and use of contraceptives and artificial methods of birth control, practices which flout teaching of the Catholic Church on the value of human life;

[4] THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG when a bill wrongly assumes that Filipinos are people of “shallow faith” and “lesser conviction,” who with the passage of time would embrace the law, as if a bad law eventually would become good, as if religious belief, and resistance to the law, would crumble in the face of repressive legal sanctions.

THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY WRONG with a bill that, I fear, would give me sleepless nights and cause me deep anguish if I would not heed my faith and my conviction.

I VOTE NO.