by Rene Ezpeleta Bartolo
Part II
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a series of three columns on population written by award-winning Rene B. Bartolo. The articles, first published in Bartolo’s Richochet column in The Mindanao Times, the city’s oldest newspaper, won first prize in the POPDev Media Awards bestowed by the Philippine Legislators’ Committee on Population and Development, for three consecutive years, installing the columnist in the hall of fame.]
How about the rise in crime and environmental degradation? Said Archbishiop Cruz: “Rising crime is more likely the result of inadequate law enforcement whilst environmental problems stem from insufficient commitment to environmental protection.”
The Catholic Church has come out against the Reproductive Health Act, calling it “a veiled attempt at coercion against families’ freedom of conscience.”
Yet the Church would deny families the right to plan the number of their children by using contraceptives, which the Lagman Bill would aggressively promote, along with a full range of family planning methods.
Contraceptives are anathema to the bishops. The CBCP flatly declared last week that “the connection between contraception and abortion is not only inseparable; they are closely identical.”
Msgr. Oscar Cruz insists: “Contraceptives are a ‘first step’ towards ‘killing the unborn’ and are ‘instruments that favor abortion’.” He adds: “The Lagman Bill will be the ‘the launching pad for murdering the unborn’.”
To my layman’s mind, that is unclear as unclear can be.
To many Catholics, it is unclear how the prevention of the formation of life is “identical” to taking life. A recent survey conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO) show that 36 out every 100 married women (most of them presumably Catholics) use contraceptives to prevent pregnancy. In the rural areas where contraceptives are not easily accessible, population growth is faster and the incidence of poverty higher.
In contrast, Muslim religious leaders issued in 2004 a fatwah expressing support of family planning. The religious directive endorsed the use of “all methods of contraception,” given that they are safe, legal and in accordance with the teachings and principles of Islam.
The fatwah was the Muslim leaders’ direct response to the high population growth rate and maternal and infant mortality rates in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
This response is tragically absent in other depressed areas of the country where the Catholic bishops hold religious sway.
Population management is a secular, not religious, concern. Overpopulation, crime, poverty, and environmental degradation are serious matters that need the attention of a secular government.
These are matters that concern human survival, not the salvation of souls.
As early as 40 years ago, soon after the release of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical De Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) in 1968, Latin American bishops admitted during a conference that “population growth in Latin America exacerbated economic, social and ethical problems, such as low nuptiality, single parent families, out-of-wedlock births, and housing shortages.” The Latin American Catholic Church affirmed that population growth caused unjust suffering for many families.
To this reality recognized by the Catholic Church of Latin America 40 years ago, the Catholic bishops of the Philippines remain blind today.
In fact, the opposition to the Reproductive Health Act has taken an ugly twist of late. Ozamis Archbishop Jesus Dosado issued a pastoral letter early this month warning that politicians supporting the reproductive health bill must be refused communion because the bill promotes “permissive abortion”, and the CBCP threatened to “punish” at the polls lawmakers supportive of the bill.
That’s clear coercion, unworthy of leaders of souls.
On closer look, however, the injunction of the Catholic bishops against family planning is not directed at the Catholic faithful belonging to the upper and middle classes in urban centers who have been using contraceptives for decades anyway to prevent unwanted pregnancies and plan their families, despite the ban from the bishops.
The interdiction is directed at an easily cowed government, and by holding hostage the population management program, the bishops are punishing Filipino Catholics in depressed areas of the country where contraception is not an act of choice and contraceptives are not easily available.
That is where population growth is fastest, where poverty incidence is highest.
So why is the government afraid of the bishops in a republic where the separation of Church and State is enshrined in the fundamental law of the land?
In a statement early this month, Senator Panfilo Lacson said: “The Arroyo government is lukewarm to the Reproductive Health bill not because of conscience but as a matter of political survival.”
I don’t suppose President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo continuously refuses to push an aggressive population management program as an act of faith, because she doesn’t want her soul to go to hell.
Rather, it is because she is afraid that the Catholic bishops will withdraw support from her administration, a withdrawal that will spell political, not spiritual, damnation.
The population problem of the Philippines is a virtual seesaw: the survival of the nation on one hand; and the survival of President Arroyo on the other.
Postscript: In her State of the Nation Address yesterday, President Gloria Arroyo doused cold water on the Reproductive Health Act. She announced that her government will push an aggressive “natural family planning program” which, she said, had “dramatically curbed” population growth.
The Catholic bishops had won – for the time being. [Published: July 29, 2008]
