Senator Grace Poe.
INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE
Presidential aspirant Senator Grace Poe expressed hope on Saturday that her long search for her biological parents “will be blessed with a positive outcome” now that more people have come out to help her identify them.
The latest was retired Judge Jesus Nograles Rodriguez Jr., 76, who offered a P300,000 reward for anyone who could offer a “solid and credible information” that could help lead to the true identity of Poe’s biological parents.
READ: Reward offered for ‘solid, credible’ info on Poe’s biological parents
Rodriguez said the reward will come from him and six golfing buddies and friends in Negros Occidental.
“I wish to thank Judge Jesus Nograles Rodriguez Jr. and all those who helped put up the reward money to help find my biological parents. I welcome their help and I pray that their well-meaning efforts would lead to the truth we are all looking for,” Poe said in a statement.
“It is no secret that I have spent many years trying to find my biological parents. All foundlings want to know who their real parents are. All foundlings go through a difficult process, growing up—as a child, as a teenager and even as an adult—they wonder, they ask. I am no different. I went through the same ordeal. I have been yearning to know.”
READ: Grace Poe urges biological parents to come forward
Poe noted that she had been in Iloilo several times and have met with relatives and family friends “in an earnest effort” to know the truth well before the issue of her being a foundling has been used against her qualifications for president.
“There are many theories and many stories, some of them jive, some are conflicting. With the help of Judge Rodriguez and his friends and my supporters here in my hometown, I really hope and pray that this time our search will be blessed with a positive outcome,” she said.
“But I have also maintained that there is a higher purpose to this, which is to fight for the equal rights of children. This is not just my fight to remain in contention for the presidency. The state should not discriminate based on circumstances of one’s birth,” she said.
READ: Grace Poe and our prejudice against the ‘ampon’
Poe said the government has a “parens patriae principlel” to act as the guardians of people who cannot effectively take care of themselves.
If children are abandoned or abused, she said, the state takes care of them and the children take the citizenship of the state that adopts them.
“It is not humane to say you have no rights just because you are a foundling, that orphaned children are stateless, that they have no country, no citizenship,” said the senator.
“Whatever happens though I am grateful to all those who believe in me, believe that I am a Filipino, and believe that I am worthy to serve them in government, through the highest office of our nation,” she further said. IDL