Lawmaker ready to take on bishops in debate on birth control bill

MANILA, Philippines—Albay Representative Edcel Lagman said Saturday he was ready to face Catholic bishops in a grand debate on the controversial reproductive health bill to settle unresolved issues once and for all.

“Whether the bishops want a sit-down dialogue or a grand debate on the controversial RH bill does not matter as long as they are willing and ready to engage face-to-face and collectively the principal authors of the bill,” Lagman said in a press statement.

Lagman said he was proposing to have non-confrontational dialogues with representatives of the Catholic hierarchy on the core provisions and concepts of the RH bill before the grand debate.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines said Friday that it welcomed an invitation from Congress to a grand debate to thresh out issues and enlighten the people further on the bill.

Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma, the current CBCP president, said the bishops were always “eager and willing to engage” in an endeavor that would help people make guided decisions, particularly on issues affecting morality and values about love, marriage and family.

Lagman proposed that the agenda for the discussions should center on freedom of informed choice; the whole menu of family planning methods from the natural to the modern which are legal, medically safe and truly effective; recognition that the Philippines has a population problem; direct linkage between population, human development and poverty; and adequate funding for reproductive health and family planning services, among other things.

He said that since the bishops were the leading oppositors of the bill, they should also be the principals in either or both the dialogues and debates.

Palma said that while the bishops would talk about the moral dimension of the issue, it would ask lay people to talk about maternal health and childbearing in the proposed debate “because that is not our expertise.”

Lagman said it would be acceptable to the lawmakers if the bishops want to be represented by laymen,  saying the fact that bishops were not married was not an issue.

“One does not have to be married in order to appreciate the import of reproductive health and its salient features, in the same manner that one does have to be a woman to espouse maternal concerns or has to die first to accept that death is inevitable,” Lagman said.