Two senators threaten to withdraw RH bill support

Two other known advocates of the controversial Reproductive Health (RH) bill in the Senate have raised the possibility of withdrawing their support from the measure if potential risks on artificial birth control methods would include the possibility of an abortion.

“If there is possibility of life after intercourse…(then) we should not allow anymore contraceptives that would prevent pregnancy,” Sen. Panfilo Lacson, one of the Senate members who filed a bill on RH, said.

He added that “if the bill will allow Levonelle (a brand of morning after pill) or whatever term we will use to describe it, then I will withdraw my support even if I am the author of this bill.”

Lacson along with Sen. Sergio Osmeña III, in debating with the main sponsor of the bill, Sen. Pia Cayetano, earlier this week had raised questions ranging from pills that may have abortive features and when life actually begins.

As interpellation on the sponsorship speeches of Cayetano and her co-sponsor Sen. Miriam

Defensor-Santiago practically provides the public a preview of actual debates on the measure, a number of other senators have also signified their intention to question the bill.

Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III, in an interview over dwIZ radio, said six other senators have lined up to interpellate the sponsors.

After Osmeña, Senators Ralph Recto, Ramon Revilla Jr., Loren Legarda, Joker Arroyo, Lito Lapid and Francis Escudero would soon follow in the ongoing deliberations.

As they took turns in interrogating Cayetano, Osmeña and Lacson, engaged their colleague on the issue of “conception” as they both noted the lack of any definition or discussion of this matter in the proposed Senate version of the measure.

Osmeña queried Cayetano why there was no definition for conception, for which even medical practitioners could not agree on.

Osmeña said he believes that conception starts at the moment of fertilization — or when a sperm cell fertilizes the egg cell.

“In other words, we do not have to wait for the zygote to be implanted in the uterus in order to consider that a human life is now in existence,” he stressed.

“We would like to go back to the time when the sperm cell meets the ovum and perhaps even give it a 48-hour period, if that is possible, by recognizing that such is the moment of conception,” he said.

Osmeña’s preferred definition throws a monkey wrench into the expansive artificial birth control methods espoused by the bill.

If Osmeña’s definition of conception and fertilization is included in the bill, it could potentially limit the artificial birth control methods to be made available to the public.

Cayetano, in response, said the lack of definition was due to the fact that framers of the 1987 Constitution, as well as those in the fields of medicine, philosophy and theology could not agree on when conception actually begins or when a human being is considered a human being.

In her own definition, Cayetano said the meeting between the sperm and the egg cell may have the potential for life but it does not mean it is already considered a human being.

She said even a fetus “represents nothing more than a potentiality for life. Conception is a process over time. It is not an event by itself.”

Osmeña said he posed the question in relation to potentially risky artificial birth control methods which could lead to abortion.

“What we are trying to pinpoint here is that we are going to have to define where there might be possible life and whether the use of a certain chemical can be used to destroy a life that is possible of existence,” he said.

While Osmeña said he has no objections to condoms and pills that prevent the meeting between the sperm and the egg cell, he has reservations on the use of “chemicals that would be utilized to destroy the union of the sperm and the egg cell because it would be destroying life.”

“When life begins, I do not think we should allow chemicals to destroy or prevent that life,” he said.

The Catholic Church has held that pills and other artificial birth control methods are abortive drugs, which means they induce the expulsion of fetus from a woman’s womb.

For his part, Lacson sought that the contraceptive action of birth control products to be made available be limited to “prior to sexual act,” noting that some pills, particularly the “morning after pill” prevents life from forming.

Lacson’s proposal effectively water down the provision in the bill which seeks to allow “the full range of safe, affordable, effective and modern methods of preventing or timing pregnancy,” as stated in Section 4 of the bill. –Angie M. Rosales, Daily Tribune