Lawyer, 2 students join fight for RH

MANILA, Philippines—A lawyer and two law students are the latest to petition the Supreme Court to allow them to intervene in court hearings on 10 Church-backed petitions opposing the implementation of the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act, or the RH law.

Lawyer Joan A. de Venecia and law students Korina Ana Manibog and Jan Robert Beltejar, in a motion filed last week, sought “leave to intervene” or present comments in the RH cases.

In their motion dated May 20, the petitioners said they would argue to dismiss the 10 petitions against the RH law and seek the lifting of the court’s status quo ante order.

Last March, the high court suspended the implementation of the RH law for four months and set the matter for debate on June 8. The high court was acting on the 10 petitions—which echo the Catholic Church’s opposition to the law that requires government health centers to promote family planning, including the use of artificial contraception, and for schools to teach sex education.

So far, five petitions to intervene have been filed by parties opposed to the anti-RH petitions. Seeking to intervene in the case are: Former Akbayan Rep. Risa Hontiveros; three former health secretaries—Esperanza Cabral, Jaime Galvez Tan and Alberto Romualdez Jr., and Sen. Pia Cayetano.

In seeking to intervene, De Venecia, Manibog and Beltejar said they were practicing Catholics and wanted to prevent the anti-RH petitioners “from misrepresenting the views of the vast majority of Catholics who do not share their, or the Catholic Church hierarchy’s antipathy towards RA 10354.”

They said they did not want “a noisy minority” to use that misrepresentation “to preempt social policy for (the benefit of) religious groups that do not even pay taxes and share in the common burden of supporting our republican democracy.”

They said they could offer a different perspective from that of the other petitioners.

In their 43-page petition, the three said they reviewed four of the 10 petitions against the RH law and found the arguments raised to be “confused, contradictory and factually baseless.”

“While those petitions attempt to construct constitutional arguments against RA 10354, it appears that they are all ultimately underpinned, not by a genuine conviction as to the existence of any constitutional flaws in the law, but by personal religious beliefs that are then packaged and presented as ersatz constitutional arguments,” they said.