President defies church

Govt to give free contraceptives

The Philippine government will provide contraceptives to poor couples who request them despite strong opposition from the dominant Roman Catholic Church, President Benigno Aquino 3rd said on Monday. Speaking during a satellite television interview from the United States where he is on a seven-day visit, President Aquino stressed that the number of children a couple had was a matter of personal choice.

“The government is obligated to inform everybody of their responsibilities and their choices. At the end of the day, the government might provide assistance to those who are without means if they want to employ a particular method,” the President said.

“I believe the couple will be in the best position to determine what is best for the family, how to space [the births], what methods they can rely on and so forth,” he told a “town-hall” style meeting that he held with expatriate Filipinos.

“They [Filipino couples] face the responsibility for the children that they bring in and the government is willing to assist them,” Mr. Aquino said.

The President, a 50-year-old bachelor and a practicing Roman Catholic, was responding to questions about how he planned to curb population growth in the face of opposition from the politically powerful Catholic church in the Philippines.

The church wields considerable influence in the Philippines, where more than 80 percent of the population are Catholics, and used its clout in the past to attack officials who champion artificial methods of birth control.

With its allies largely from civil society, it has also successfully blocked passage of a proposed law, first introduced in 2008, that would require the state to provide its citizens with “natural and modern family-planning” means.

But a survey conducted by a research group in January this year found that as many as 68 percent of voters believed that the government should provide couples with all legal means of family planning.

A month later, then-Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral incurred the wrath of the Roman Catholic Church when the department handed out free condoms in Manila on Valentine’s Day.

Three bishops demanded that Cabral be fired but she remained in her post until a change of administration that saw then Senator Aquino succeed Gloria Arroyo as the nation’s highest leader.

The Philippines estimates its 2010 population at 94.01 million, up from 76.5 million in the 2000 census and making it the 12th most populous nation in the world.

A party-list lawmaker agreed with the President that all Filipinos, particularly women, deserve to be told about their choices where birth control is concerned.

“It is an objective reality that a big number of women experience unwanted pregnancies because they are not adequately informed about their sexuality and reproductive health rights and responsibilities,” Rep. Emerenciana de Jesus said in a statement also on Monday.

According to de Jesus, many artificial birth-control options are out of reach of poor women.

“Access to contraceptives is feasible only for the middle- or upper-income status women. Other women may have also been victims of sexual violence, assault or rape, while others may be facing physical, mental and emotional risks related to their pregnancies. For the greatest majority of pregnant women coming from the lower income level, confronting their daily economic fears and insecurities regarding the future of their unborn child may even be nightmarish,” she said.

Apparently, inaccessibility drives a number of these women to resort to unsafe abortion, de Jesus added.

The result, she said, is finding fetuses in “garbage bins and tree tops.”

“Let us feed women with proper information on their reproductive health rights. It is the role of the state to make these rights fully realizable, providing them with adequate resources and putting in place a scientific and rights-based policy that should be enshrined in the Reproductive Health Law that Congress must pass as an urgent measure,” de Jesus added. –AFP