Enrile draws over-the-top parallels for RH bill

For something that concerns what couples do in the privacy of their bedrooms, it drew some over-the-top historical parallels.

The Senate debate on Wednesday on the contentious reproductive health (RH) bill raised nightmarish, if not “apocalyptic,” scenarios, with one critic going to the extreme of evoking the horrors of Nazi Germany, the genocide in Cambodia, and the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein.

Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile questioned the intention of legislating a national policy that ostensibly would promote responsible parenthood and a more aggressive distribution of contraceptives in the country.

Enrile warned that the proposed measure, now included among the Aquino administration’s priority bills, was ultimately intended to “exterminate procreation” and control population.

“What reason can we morally advance to justify the idea embedded in the recesses of Senate Bill No. 2865 to accomplish the sustained and deliberate reduction of the size of Filipino families, especially the poor and marginalized, through birth control in the guise of adopting a reproductive health policy for this country?” Enrile asked during the plenary debates.

Enrile said the RH bill, sponsored by Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Pia Cayetano, was “objectively intended to exterminate procreation or limit procreation.”

“The tendency and the result of this bill are to control population,” Enrile stressed.

Informed choice

But the bill’s proponents insisted that it was primarily meant to help Filipinos of reproductive age come up with an informed choice.

“There is nothing in the bill that advocates and abets the extermination of future human beings that are considered pests to society,” Ms. Cayetano said.

Cayetano said the bill sought to provide information to individuals planning their own families “so that they can decide for themselves what to them is morally, personally, financially, socially acceptable.”

Still questioning the morality of the RH bill, Enrile went on to cite some of the most gruesome crimes and controversial medical practices in the 20th century:

“If we condemn the idea of euthanasia that renders mercy killing in the guise of (being merciful) to a needy human being, if we condemn eugenics that advocates selective breeding in the guise of improving hereditary qualities, if we condemn the idea behind the act of Adolf Hitler in exterminating Jews in Europe in the guise of preserving the superiority of the Aryan race, if we condemn the idea behind the killing fields of Pol Pot in Cambodia in the guise of reforming the social ills of his country, and if we condemn the mass graves of Saddam Hussein in Iraq where he buried his political enemies in the guise of maintaining law and order in his country—what reason can we morally advance to justify (the bill)?”

Essential medicines

Enrile also warned against what he called the abortifacient properties of some contraceptive devices which in the bill were considered as “essential medicines” to be made available to citizens for free.

“(They carry) the same idea as those crimes covered by the Rome Statues (creating the International Criminal Court) that the Senate ratified in record time recently,” Enrile said.

The Senate and House versions of the RH bill aim to guarantee universal access to methods and information on family planning, birth control and maternal care. If passed into law, the measure would mandate public and private health facilities to provide a full range of modern family planning methods, whether natural or artificial.

The influential Catholic Church and its lay leaders have raised strong opposition to the RH bill, their arguments anchored mainly on the premise that artificial contraception is akin to abortion.

At the August 16 meeting of the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (Ledac), President Aquino called for the immediate passage of 13 measures that included a “fine-tuned” RH bill that would be more palatable to the Catholic Church.

Before Wednesday’s session, the Senate held two lengthy debates on the RH bill last month centering on the question of whether life begins at fertilization (the meeting of the egg and sperm) or at the moment the fertilized cell is implanted in the womb.

Cayetano-Enrile clash

Enrile’s interpellation of Cayetano on Wednesday occasionally grew intense, with the latter raising her voice at her 87-year-old colleague. At one point, Enrile told her: “Don’t teach me how to interpellate.” She shot back: “Don’t teach me how to answer.”

Tension was defused when Sen. Miriam Santiago, a legal luminary, took Cayetano’s place.

At this point, Enrile asked what would be the national policy, as shaped by the bill, in case of a continued rise in the country’s population growth rate. Putting it more tersely, he asked: “Who decides who will procreate and who will not?”

Ms. Santiago replied: “No one will make a decision because this is not a Nazi or fascist state. We stand on the platform that the ideal fertility rate should be what the woman wants.”

But Enrile reminded Santiago that beyond the individual’s choice, policymakers like senators may have to look at society as a whole and “consider the national interest.”

“We are talking about the totality of society, and that society has its own peculiar interests,” Enrile said.

‘No coercion’

Santiago went back to her counterargument: “Who will decide? That answer is ‘I hope nobody’—because we will no longer be a democracy. We will be something else. Our core principle, we who are pro-RH, is that there should be no coercion any which way to have a lot of children, to have no children, (or) to have one, two or three children.”

“Our platform is women should be free to have as many children as they think they can responsibly raise with a good quality of life, for the mother, the children and the rest of the family,” Santiago added.

Enrile pressed on and asked who would decide whether to reduce population in the event that growth “goes up (to) the acceptable level.”

“It will always be the Senate, the senior legislative chamber of the Philippine Congress representing the people of the Philippines,” Santiago said.—With report from Lawrence de Guzman, Inquirer Research