Presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda. INQUIRER file photo
Malacañang on Wednesday urged Congress to finally put the reproductive health (RH) bill to a vote.
“The battle lines have been drawn,” presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda told a press briefing yesterday, citing the statements and positions issued by various lawmakers.
“Let’s end the debates so we can determine what the decision of the legislature will be,” he said.
The Senate, which is debating the bill in the plenary, is reportedly evenly divided between those for and against the measure.
House Majority Leader Neptali Gonzales, meanwhile, has expressed doubt that the measure could be put to a vote in the House before the recess in October.
Lacierda said Malacañang was not imposing its will on a separate branch of government, “but again, this cannot last forever.”
The family-planning measure is a priority legislation of the Aquino administration.
At the Senate plenary debates on Tuesday, Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Pia Cayetano took turns in scolding Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III for the latter’s spirited opposition to their pet measure.
Santiago became incensed when Sotto described Senate Bill No. 2865 as “redundant,” rattling off a number of existing laws—the Magna Carta for Women and the Philippine AIDS Control and Prevention Act, among them—that he said already addressed the concerns of the RH bill.
“What’s our problem? We just want to provide information to the people! Why? Is there anything in the Constitution that says that there are certain classes of information that shall be denied to certain classes of people, particularly when they are very, very poor?” Santiago said in Filipino.
After a lengthy tirade, Santiago apologized to Sotto: “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more polite in answering.”
Sotto accepted the apology, but explained that he had to scrutinize SB 2865 “because we’re making a national policy on contraceptives.”
Cayetano also lost her cool when Sotto asked what her source was for the information that 500,000 illegal abortions were occurring in the Philippines.
“Go to Baclaran. Have your staff go there, have them work there and you will see how many people in front of the Baclaran church are selling herbal concoctions that are supposed to have the effect of abortion,” she told Sotto.
Cayetano had been arguing that because safe abortions were not allowed in the country, illegal abortions had become rampant, citing the 500,000 figure although she did not state whether it referred to a yearly statistic. She argued that there was a need not to legalize abortion but to address the reasons why women resort to abortions.
Meanwhile, some Catholic bishops on Wednesday said the use of Filipino in the Senate RH debates would be helpful not only to the English language-challenged Senator Manuelito “Lito” Lapid but to ordinary people to better understand the issue.
“It’s good to use Filipino so that more people, especially in the grassroots, would understand the arguments surrounding the bill,” said Tagbilaran Bishop Leonardo Medroso, hair of the Episcopal Commission on Canon Law.
Caloocan Bishop Deogracias Iñiguez said using Filipino as a medium to conduct the debates “would be laudable,” though he admitted that the use of English was “more for practicality.” He said that the other major languages in the country could also be considered.
Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz also agreed that the use of Filipino in the debates would help make the issue more comprehensible although he conceded that there were some nuances in English that cannot be expressed in Filipino.
On Tuesday, Lapid admitted that his lack of facility in English was preventing him from participating in the RH debates. With a report from Jocelyn R. Uy