Can dialogue on RH work?

Birth control advocates state their case plainly:

• Responsible parenthood includes planning of family size and spacing of pregnancies. Planned family size and pregnancies enable parents to feed, rear and teach their children well.

• Reproductive health benefits both mother and child. Properly spaced pregnancies allow mothers to recover body-mind, work gainfully and live full lives, and infants to grow right. It’s a basic right of mothers and youths.

• Wives, being the child-bearers, must have a say in the number of children they will have. Gender equality enables women to protect their health and other interests.

• For various reasons like penury, distance or reluctant elders, citizens are deprived of basic info and materials for family and pregnancy planning, and reproductive health. Government must fill the void.

• Population growth and size must be planned as well in order to better allocate meager state resources and alleviate poverty. In plotting the growth rate and size, government must not coerce citizens but instead give them free choice while respecting moral and religious beliefs.

• Abortion is illegal. Still, doctors must care for mothers who have imperiled themselves by the illegal act with, say, infection or excessive bleeding. Contraception reduces the temptation to abortion.

• Government must educate and give materials for couples to practice either or both natural and artificial contraception. The first includes abstinence, the Billings ovulation and calendar rhythm methods, and withdrawal. The second includes barriers like condoms and intra-uterine devices (IUD), the Pill, oral and injectible spermicides, tubal ligation for women, and vasectomy for men.

Malacañang is on the side of family-population planning. It clashes totally with Philippine Catholic hierarchs. Bishops claim that artificial contraceptives like the Pill and IUD are abortifacient, and, as alien substances, harm women’s bodies. Condoms, ligation and vasectomy may not abort, but are wrong just the same because these allegedly promote promiscuity even between spouses. Citing Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, they say that sex should not be for pleasure alone but also procreation. So they frown upon even the natural method of withdrawal. In pre-marriage seminars, the Billings and rhythm methods are downplayed; abnegation, the most difficult for ordinary mortals, is promoted as the best way. Bishops foresee countries that allow contraceptives invariably to end up allowing abortion as well. They also foretell economic disaster if Philippine population growth slows down. For them, poverty is caused not by fast population growth but corruption and greedy elite rule.

The numbers are for the advocates of population-family planning. Nations that freely teach and support artificial contraception as extension of natural methods, and have slower population growth are relatively richer. This includes those where Catholics predominate: Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and Poland. About 83 percent of Filipinos list themselves as Catholic, but most do not subscribe to Filipino bishops’ line against artificial methods. In a 2008 Social Weather Stations survey, 76 percent of Filipinos wanted family planning taught in public schools, and 71 percent favored a reproductive health law.

Malacañang and the Catholic bishops are to dialogue on their opposing stands. One wonders what they can agree on. Reproductive health advocates would easily grant that contraceptives scientifically proven to cause abortion be banned. But what will the bishops concede? Will they be willing to publicly admit that their anti-artificial stand is not ex-cathedra doctrine? Will they consent to promote the Billings and rhythm methods in parishes if only to blunt their feared onslaught of artificial methods?

The bishops say that while they have agreed to dialogue, they will not stop lay leaders from staging protest actions and civil disobedience. Let’s hope that these do not lead to antagonism in the streets and churches. –Jarius Bondoc (The Philippine Star)

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