Another anti-RH ordinance

One can easily remember the fate of the Ayala Alabang barangay ordinance prohibiting the sale of contraceptives which a sweeping multitude of oppositors rallied against and consequently led the city council to shoot it down for being unconstitutional.

Seven Sangguniang Barangays in Balanga City, in the province of Bataan, recently passed similar torturous barangay ordinances. The barangays are Cupang Proper, Cupang West, Puerto Rivas Ibaba, Puerto Rivas Itaas, Puerto Rivas Lote, Tortugas, and Tanato.

The ordinances penalize the sale, promotion, advertisement and prescription of modern contraceptives including hormonal contraceptives and intrauterine devices (IUDs), prohibit the use of barangay funds for the purchase or provision of such contraceptives, prohibit barangay officials from soliciting, accepting or dispensing such contraceptives, and declaring as void business permits of barangay enterprises for violating the ordinances’ provisions. They penalize the conduct of sex education to minor students without the written permission of parents, and solely promote the so-called natural family planning method (NFP). Reports say that residents of Barangay Catangi drafted an identical ordinance but decided to withhold its signing upon learning of the planned legal action against the ordinances.

Legal experts Dean Pacifico Agabin and Prof. Alfredo Tadiar and legal organizations such as the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers and EnGender Rights filed their position papers with the Sangguniang Panglunsod of Balanga, on Sept. 5, challenging the constitutionality of the ordinances. The same position papers were mailed to the seven Sangguniang Barangays urging them to junk said ordinances for being unconstitutional.

In his letter to the Sangguniang Panglunsod of Balanga, former dean of the UP College of Law, Atty. Pacifico A. Agabin, said that the Barangay Tortugas ordinance is constitutionally infirm on four fundamental grounds: they violate freedom of expression guaranteed by the free speech clause of the Constitution; violate the right to privacy included in the concept of “liberty” under the Due Process Clause; violate the right of the people to be secure in their “persons” and the right of privacy of communication, and, that Section 6, No. 5 “are beyond the competence of the barangay to enact, as the matter of discipline is already governed by existing national laws.”

In his position paper against the Barangay Tortugas ordinance, Prof. Tadiar said that by taking its “announced war against the Reproductive Health bill pending in Congress that is now polarizing the country into believers and non-believers of Roman Catholic moral doctrines to the media — print and TV — the clear impression cannot be escaped that the Roman Catholic Church has mobilized its followers not only at the national level but now also at the barangay levels to pass the questioned ordinance against contraceptives.”

“If that distinct impression proves correct, the ineluctable conclusion follows that the Roman Catholic Church is exerting utmost efforts to turn local government units, starting with the barangays, into sectarian ones, as lamentably they were and had been during the Spanish colonial era. As it is now doing in strongly opposing any divorce law in the Philippines, and glorying in the dubious distinction that it is now the only country in the world without any divorce law, the Roman Catholic Church is clearly bent to turn the country and all its local government units into sectarian ones.”

When that happens, Tadiar continues, “the blessings of independence and democracy under the rule of law that we sought to ‘secure for ourselves and our posterity’ in promulgating the Constitution, and the duty of government to promote ‘the general welfare for the enjoyment by all the people of the blessings of democracy’ will have perished with what in effect is the re-conversion of our country into a sectarian one. As under the Spanish colonial era, the Philippines will have retrogressed and turned back the hands of time to be governed by the medieval laws of that sectarian era.

“It is important to always bear in mind that it was against that sectarian rule that the Philippines mounted the first revolution in Asia against a colonial power.”

A rabid oppositionist in the Senate refutes the RH bill supporters’ claim that the RH bill in Congress is not for abortion; he asks, if that is so, why does the bill provide for services for post-abortion complications?

Tadiar responds to that charge in his position paper against the Tortugas ordinance, as he touches on contraception as preventing resort to abortion. He says that “the more women and men who are encouraged to use contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancy, the less need there will be for resorting to abortion to terminate it.”

He reports that in the Year 2000, there were 473,400 women who had resorted to abortion; 9 per cent of these women died. That means 42,570 women died that year. “Preventable and unnecessary death of about 117 women daily took place in that year alone,” writes Tadiar.

The Tortugas ordinance, says Tadiar, restricts access to artificial contraceptives “on religious and moral grounds based on Roman Catholic beliefs. The public health issue that it abets resort to unsafe abortion resulting in hospitalization for complications and even the preventable deaths of women who chose that method of terminating unwanted pregnancies, was never considered at all.”

It is well to take note, Tadiar continues, of the Social Weather Station survey, which showed that 82 percent of Filipino adults nationwide agree that, the “choice of family planning methods is a personal decision of the couple, and no one should interfere with it.” Thus, the Tortugas ordinance “interferes with the freedom to choose.”

The barangay, according to Tadiar, has three functions: for planning and implementing policies and programs; to act as forum for the expression and crystallization of the collective views of the people, and for the amicable settlement of disputes. “It is plain that Barangay Tortugas has utterly failed to perform the second and third functions. Far from gathering the collective view of the community and amicably settling their dispute on this matter, the Sangguniang Barangay, by passing the questioned ordinance, has crystallized the divisions of the community and polarized it between adherents and non-adherents of the Roman Catholic faith.”

The Tortugas ordinance is an improvement on the Alabang ordinance. “This infers the guiding hand of a conductor of an orchestra or of a choir who coordinates the different musical instruments of an orchestra or the different voices of a choir, in order to prevent discordant sounds from marring the music. The conductor, in this case, seems plainly to point to the Roman Catholic Church or to the pro-life movement, to achieve their single-minded objective to impose their views on non-believers of the Catholic faith. In the words of (Jesuit father Joaquin) Bernas, this is the use of state (barangay) power to impose Catholic belief on all others . . . reminiscent of the Inquisition.’ This is something that gives the Catholic religion a bad name.” –Domini M. Torrevillas (The Philippine Star)