Church to use pulpit against RH bill, sex ed

MANILA, Philippines—Catholic priests said they would use the pulpit to step up their campaign against the proposed Reproductive Health (RH) bill as its proponents rallied their own local and international troops to urge its passage.

Caloocan Bishop Deogracias Iniguez said the priests would expound on the alleged dangers posed by the RH bill in their homilies in time for the Feast of Christ the King today.

The Church is against the bill’s promotion of modern methods of birth control, which it denounces as “abortifacient,” and the mandating of sex education in schools.

Iniguez said Church homilies “should really emphasize the need to let God reign in our hearts but maybe they could also include some discussion about the RH bill,” Iniguez said in an interview.

The Church successfully blocked attempts in past Congresses to pass the RH bill but members of the influential Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines have admitted that they may have a hard time campaigning against it in the present Congress.

Vatican stranglehold

On the other side, Dr. Martha Campbell, of the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability of the University of California, Berkeley, noted that “the Philippines is the only remaining country where the Catholic Church has real control over women’s health. Or to say it in another way, the Philippines is the last bastion of the Vatican (where it) still (has) a stranglehold on women’s health.”

Catholic European countries have become secularized and no longer follow the Church’s teaching on birth control while Latin America—including the biggest Catholic country in the world, Brazil—has decided to slow down their population growth rate, said Campbell, lending support to the local RH campaigners.

“We can still benefit from the beauty of the spirituality of the Catholic church without having to buy into mythology that causes great pain and suffering, particularly of women and children and the fathers,” she said.

“This is supposed to be a church about life and it makes me very sad that a religion that claims to be about life is inadvertently causing so many deaths—deaths of mothers and deaths of children,” Campbell added.

RH advocates say that more than 10 women die daily due to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications and unsafe abortions and over half (56 percent) of yearly maternal deaths are unreported.

They said passing the RH bill, and making available contraceptives, would cut by half the number of illegal abortions in the country, estimated at around 500,000 annually.

‘Consensus’ bill

An attempt at a compromise position has been presented by former Sen. Vicente Paterno. He said some business groups want to propose a “consensus” bill that would ban only those contraceptives that the Department of Health would consider as “abortifacient.”

“We hope that more progressive bishops will appreciate that providing access to information on family planning and giving the poorest families, at least those in the lowest quintile, the means they chose to implement their (family) plans is truly an act of social justice,” Paterno said.

DOH officials said the poorest segment of Filipinos include 5.2 million families whose average monthly income is P3,460. –Philip Tubeza, Philippine Daily Inquirer