Baguio City battleground of RH bill foes, backers

BAGUIO CITY—This city has become a battleground for the hearts and minds of the youth between advocates and critics of the reproductive health (RH) bill for at least a month now.

On Saturday, the Catholic Church mounted two simultaneous forums on the measure, armed with the belief that they are dealing with advocates who were supposedly “brainwashed” by sex education classes in the 1980s.

Dr. Angelita Miguel-Aguirre, a member of the faculty of medicine and surgery at University of Santo Tomas, said the preoccupation with sex by both government policymakers and a vocal youth was the result of the state’s sex education program in high school.

Aguirre is one of the key people behind the controversial ordinance in Ayala Alabang that required residents to secure doctor’s prescription to buy condoms and other contraceptives.

Many Catholic churches and schools in Baguio now bear “No to RH” posters, tarpaulins and signboards. A tarpaulin, with graphic pictures of diseases and wounds supposedly acquired from contraceptive use, was posted at the gate of a Church-run nursery school until parents prompted school officials to relocate it.

On Sept. 7, advocates of the bill mounted a daylong promotional activity for the measure, concluding with a parade led by students in purple body paint.

Called the “Day of Purple Ribbon,” RH advocates also mounted a separate event in Pangasinan on Friday.

Aguirre told an audience of Catholic nuns, teachers and students at St. Louis Center here that providing the youth lessons in sexuality had been “too much, too early.”

She said some sex education materials discuss anal sex to teens and introduce elementary pupils to flavored condoms and oral sex.

“This brainwashing has been going on for decades,” she said.

Aguirre said condoms offer no protection against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and that the birth control pill popularized in the 1960s increases a woman’s risk to cancer. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon