Speaker welcomes Church poll on RH

MANILA, Philippines—House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. on Thursday welcomed a proposal for the Church to commission its own survey to ascertain the “pulse of the poor” on the reproductive health bill, but predicted it would produce the same results.

“I’d go along with that. That’s perfectly legitimate for them to come out with their own survey,’’ said Belmonte, an advocate of the RH bill.

“It will be good if they define the word abortifacients,’’ he said.

Novaliches Bishop Emeritus Teodoro Bacani broached the idea for the Church to conduct an extensive survey at the diocesan level to validate whether majority of the Filipinos indeed favored the RH bill.

RH bill proponents have been citing past surveys showing that 70 to 80 percent of Filipinos favor the population measure to drum up support for their proposed legislation.

RH bill provisions

Bacani said the new survey should explain the salient provisions of the bill, including those relating to contraceptives, which he said the previous surveys failed to cover.

Belmonte—who steered the approval of a reproductive health ordinance when he was mayor of Quezon City—said, however, that he was confident a fresh survey would confirm previous survey results.

“They’ll get maybe even better results. In Quezon City, we’ve had for the last two years a reproductive health ordinance,’’ he said.

Until their recent revival, the proposed population bills had been in limbo in Congress for more than 10 years because of strong Church opposition.

President Aquino’s stated support for couples seeking to limit the number of their children through contraceptives also provided the reproductive health bills a shot in the arm.

The House committee on population and family relations began hearings on six RH bills on Wednesday.

According to Belmonte, the House is dead-set on approving the measure at the end of Congress’ first regular session next June, if possible. If not, the chamber would pursue its approval in the second or third regular sessions, he said.

But the measure being “highly contentious,’ Belmonte said it would be prudent for the House to let the bill “go through the process’’.

“What the leaders would like to do is to get it to the point of being voted on. At that point it’s not a question of arm-twisting everybody. This is one of the issues where virtually everybody is as informed as can be,’’ he said.

Pope’s book

Belmonte said Pope Benedict XVI’s recent about-face on the issue of condom use “[would not] harm the pro-RH side at all”.

Excerpts from the Pope’s most recent book, “Light of the World,” published on Tuesday, showed the conservative pontiff conceding that there might be extreme cases in which there were grounds for the use of condoms, such as the prevention of HIV-AIDS.

This marked a seeming shift from the Church’s long opposition to the use of condoms and contraceptives.

Elucidating on the Pope’s comments, the Vatican on Wednesday said condoms were the lesser of two evils when used to stop the spread of HIV-AIDS, even if their use would prevent a pregnancy.

“[The way I see it], there’s been a dent in the solid stance of the Church,’’ Belmonte said. –TJ Burgonio, Philippine Daily Inquirer