Pseudo reproductive health

The backers of the RH bill have again strutted out statistics from a policy research organization based in New York, U.S.A. The report allegedly covers a study on women’s contraceptive needs in the Philippines showing that 4,600 mothers and 52,000 babies died in the country last year from unwanted pregnancies and birth related causes. Of the pregnancy related deaths, 2,600 were attributed to complications due to abortion. Guttemacher Institute which made the study claims these mothers and babies died because of lack of knowledge on sexual and reproductive health.

The Guttemacher statistics may be accurate but its claim as to the cause of these deaths is wrong. In the U.S.A. where Guttemacher is based, a proportionately much bigger number of mothers and babies die due to unwanted pregnancies and birth related causes. Yet this is the very country where women even at their tender age are sexually well educated and afforded reproductive health rights and choices in methods of controlling births.

As the report says, mothers and babies die due to unwanted pregnancies and birth related causes. U.S. statistics again show that ever since Americans started using all sorts of artificial contraceptives, unwanted pregnancies have tremendously increased. Obviously American women have developed a contraceptive mentality that often results in unwanted pregnancies since most of these contraceptives are not fail safe. And because of these unwanted pregnancies, women resort to abortion which America openly allows and supports. Hence more mothers and babies die there precisely because women are afforded alleged reproductive health rights and choices in the use of contraceptives.

Deaths due to unwanted pregnancies and birth related causes will not be prevented or minimized by the passage of the Reproductive Health and Population Management and Development Act (RH Bill). On the contrary, the death rate due to said causes will increase even more by the passage of said bill because it grants women a wide ranging choice of family planning methods that include these abortion causing or ineffectual artificial contraceptives.  If the RH Bill is passed, there will be more unwanted pregnancies and hence more cases of abortion. This is not a mere hypothesis. This is happening in America, the home of Guttemacher Institute and most of the Pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing and selling those artificial contraceptives that cause abortion and other serious illnesses. So why should we believe this Guttemacher report?

There may be lack of access to information on reproductive health and family planning especially among impoverished women. But the RH Bill does not actually provide them with such information. The truth is that the Bill will even subsidize the purchase of these harmful artificial contraceptives without requiring the dissemination of the necessary warning to women that they may cause abortion and other serious illnesses or that they can not really prevent pregnancies.

Of course women are entitled to reproductive health rights. But like other rights, it should be exercised without injuring or affecting the very life of others as in abortion. They have rights to safeguard the health of their own bodies but these rights do not allow them to destroy the lives of innocent and helpless infants in their wombs by resorting to abortion after the unexpected pregnancies caused by the failure of contraceptives. Indeed the U.S. Supreme Court already accepted and recognized that whether contraceptives are abortifacients or not, the decision to use contraception is “in some critical respects” of the same character as abortion.

Under the RH Bill, artificial contraceptives are made available on demand at the expense of the government and for the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing them. But it has already been medically proven that these contraceptives are the causes of many diseases and infirmities rather than reproductive health. Dr. Carl Djerassi who developed the pill in 1960 himself found its “adverse effect on virtually every organ system of the human body, interfering as it does with the normal functioning of the woman’s vitally important reproductive system. Making these contraceptives available to our women would thus result in the eventual deaths of more mothers and babies or in more babies with congenital malformations and defects. The situation in America, the land of Guttemacher Institute and the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing these contraceptives will confirm this.

Thus the solution to this alarming growth in the deaths of mothers and babies is to junk the RH Bill. Instead another bill should be passed wherein the billions of pesos allocated for these contraceptives should be devoted to the improvement of the medical care services to poor, pregnant women and to the health care of babies. This is the real, honest to goodness reproductive health care that our country needs, not the reproductive health contemplated by the RH Bill where only the multinational pharmaceutical companies manufacturing and selling artificial contraceptives profit most at the expense of Filipino taxpayers.

Filipinos should not be deluded into believing this kind of deceptive propaganda being waged by foreign funded groups connected with an international population control movement aggressively pushing for artificial contraceptive methods that precisely cause abortion and expose Filipino women and babies to other serious health problems. To be sure, with Obama’s recent executive order allowing the use of American taxpayers’ money to support the promotion of this fake “reproductive health” in other countries like the Philippines, these groups will become more aggressive as they are now provided with more logistics.

Thus the clear picture in the public’s mind at this stage is that this RH Bill promoting harmful and dangerous contraceptives could be approved only if our legislators succumb to the pressure of these internationally backed groups and their filthy lucre. –Jose C. Sison, Philippine Star