Sotto: Some RH bill advocates are pro-abortion

MANILA, Philippines – Some groups backing the Reproductive Health (RH) bill are for abortion and are part of a movement seeking to eliminate the world’s poor people.

Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III expressed this concern on Tuesday, the second day of Senate debates on the controversial measure.

In particular, Sotto mentioned the Family Planning Organization of the Philippines, which he said is a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). He is alarmed because the founder of IPPF, Margaret Sanger, is the “inventor of this scientific term called eugenics.”

Sotto defined eugenics as a strategy of eliminating “the poor, the weak, the useless, and the uneducated.”

“Nakakadagdag po sa aming pangamba,” he said. “I hope the committee can explain to us further and enlighten us further so we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Health and demography committee chair Sen. Pia Cayetano, a sponsor of the RH bill, explained that the IPPF supports all forms of family planning depending on the laws of each country.

In the Philippines, where abortion is illegal, Cayetano said “it is not a form of family planning method they support.”

Cayetano and the bill’s author, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, have repeatedly stressed that the RH bill does not promote abortion and will even help prevent it.

Sotto also questioned the need for an RH law, since no law prohibits anyone from purchasing contraceptives anyway.

“What we’re doing now through the RH bill is we’re prescribing it,” he said.

Cayetano said it’s a misconception.

“No one will ever be forced to use any particular contraceptive,” she said. “What is being done by the measure is make these services available to people who will choose to do so based on their own personal need.”

For his part, local government committee chairman Ferdinand Marcos Jr. believes the RH bill would help improve health services by local government units (LGUs).

Marcos, a former governor of Ilocos Norte, explained that local governments would greatly benefit from an RH law, which will mandate the national government to assist LGUs in providing reproductive health services to the people.

“If there is a mandate from the national government that the local governments can ask for assistance from the national government under the auspices of this proposed law, I guarantee that every local government official will try to do everything that he can to help,” he said. –Ryan Chua, ABS-CBN News