The
past year has seen the Philippines come closer than at any point in its history
to enshrining as state policy the aggressive promotion of the use of
contraceptives (including those with abortifacient qualities) and the coercive
silencing of pro-life criticisms and objections to anti-life government
initiatives, in the form of a bill “On
Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health, and Population and Development.”
The
battle over the “RH bill” (as the proposed law is often called), between the
Church on one side and the Philippine government and its allies—including some
non-Catholic churches—on the other side, has been bitter, and has revealed the
extent to which an increasing number of Filipinos have adopted the language, if
not the mindset, of Western-style militant secularism.
The
Reproductive Health Bill—now known as House Bill 4244—contains many dubious
provisions. The proposed law’s “Guiding
Principles” declare that “freedom of choice” is fully guaranteed by the state,
and that the state “shall promote programs that enable couples, individuals,
and women to have the number and spacing of children they desire with due
consideration to the health of women and resources available to them,” thus
implicitly endorsing and supporting sexual relationships outside of marriage.
Going further, the bill also insists on “the absence of discrimination on the
basis of a person’s sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity” (Section 4)
and clarifies (in Section 11) that family planning supplies will be made
available to all “women of reproductive age.” Furthermore, the lengthy Section
16 specifies that both public and private schools (and many of the latter are
Catholic) will have to use the same government-designed sex education
curriculum, which will be taught to students from the ages of 10 to 16 and will
include “values formation” and information on family-planning methods.
The
bill evinces a muddled approach to the question of overpopulation, stating on
one hand (in its “Guiding Principles”)
that “human resource is among the principal asset [sic] of this country” and
that “there shall be no demographic or population targets,” while on the other
hand declaring that “the limited resources of the country cannot be suffered to
be spread so thinly to service a burgeoning multitude,” and repeating (in
Section 20) the “two-child ideal” found in earlier forms of the bill. (This
time around, though, the debates regarding the RH bill have not focused on this
“ideal.”)
The
bill maintains that the Philippines’ anti-abortion legislation will remain
intact. However, the same bill explicitly declares that “all women needing care
for post-abortion complications shall be treated and counseled in a humane,
non-judgmental, and compassionate manner” (“Guiding Principles”). At the very least, this represents a major
shift from Philippine law’s traditional sternness toward abortion, an attitude
that has always balanced post-abortive women’s needs for medical treatment with
the need to give justice to slain babies.
Perhaps
the most controversial aspects of the bill are its declarations that “modern
family-planning methods” (that is, contraceptives) will be considered essential
medicines for all hospitals and government health units (Section 10). The
implementation of this policy will certainly result in a large portion of the
Philippines’ perpetually strained budget being allocated for the purchase and
distribution of contraceptives (particularly egregious given that many
government health centers lack basic medicines for common illnesses, and many
places in the country have no health centers at all). Finally, the law seeks to
penalize with fines and prison time any health care service provider who
refuses either to provide reproductive health services or to refer those
seeking such services to another provider, and of “any person who maliciously
engages in disinformation” about the RH bill (Sections 28 and 29).
As
of this writing, no amendments have been introduced into the official text of
the bill in order to modify any of the objectionable clauses mentioned above,
even though some congressional advocates of the bill have publicly announced
their intention to remove or modify at least some of the legislation’s most
controversial parts.
Attempts
to pass laws vigorously promoting contraception, often including dubious
demographic goals, have taken place in the Philippines since the presidency of
Joseph Estrada (1998-2001), but stalled during the long presidency of the
ostensibly devout Catholic Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001-2010), who was
expected to veto such laws. As 2009 passed the halfway mark and the presidential
elections of 2010 loomed on the horizon, no mainstream political body appeared
ready to take on the Church by promising to push the RH bill, before or after
the elections. Things were to change almost overnight, however—and in a way
that was particularly unexpected for the Church.
PRO-LIFE QUEEN,
PRO-CHOICE CROWN PRINCE
The
death of former President Corazon “Cory” Aquino on August 1, 2009 was greeted
by a level of national mourning that was as emotional as it was unexpected.
While she had been fondly remembered for her role in restoring democracy in the
Philippines, her six years in office (1986-1992) saw the country’s economy get
battered by insurgency, natural catastrophes, and military uprisings. Nevertheless,
when Mrs. Aquino died after a long and public battle with cancer, she was
immediately elevated by popular acclaim to the pantheon of Philippine heroes.
In tribute to her political stature and her public devotion to Catholicism,
part of her wake was held in the main body of Manila Cathedral. Her
nationally-televised funeral procession was joined by hundreds of thousands of
people, and there were even calls from some sectors for her cause of
canonization to be launched. The significance of this sudden revival of “Cory
Magic” was not lost on the country’s politicians, and within days of Corazon
Aquino’s death the entire landscape of Philippine politics was transformed.
Then-Senator
Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, only son of Corazon and Benigno Aquino, Jr., was
seen as the natural heir to the position once occupied by his mother—the
Philippine presidency. Noynoy Aquino, who was not even under serious
consideration as a presidential candidate in the months before his mother’s
death, soon found himself leading one of the main opposition parties as its standard-bearer
for the Philippine presidential elections of May 2010, which he won
convincingly. Many devout Catholics supported him mainly because he was his
mother’s son, and as such was expected to listen to (and obey) the voice of the
Catholic Church.
Noynoy
Aquino’s presidential campaign successfully used nostalgia for the ideals of
the Corazon Aquino-led and Church-inspired EDSA Revolution of 1986, along with
continuing despair at the perceived corruption of subsequent administrations,
to weld together a powerful coalition of devout Catholics, secular charity
workers, media figures, and opinion-makers that was equally fervent in its
devotion to Mr. Aquino and its attacks on his perceived opponents. Despite his
co-authorship of one of the versions of the Reproductive Health Bill that had
stalled under Macapagal-Arroyo, and of his various pronouncements in favor of
the RH bill, many Catholics held out hope that, once elected to the presidency,
he would come around to their cause simply because he was the son of Corazon
Aquino. This prevented the question of the RH bill’s passage from becoming a
decisive campaign issue, despite the attempts of some pro-life groups to divert
support to other presidential candidates who seemed more willing to listen to
the Church on the issue. As if to make way for the inevitable, the final months
of the Macapagal-Arroyo presidency saw a dramatic shift in policy regarding
sexual matters, with the Department of Health promoting contraceptives on a
massive scale, even though the sitting president continued to show no support
for the RH bill.
With
the start of Noynoy Aquino’s presidency at the end of June 2010, the RH bill
was immediately re-filed in almost-unchanged form by its re-elected congressional
proponents. The first signs that the new president was not about to follow the
Church on this issue came less than a month after he took office: the Catholic
Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) asked for a dialogue with the
administration regarding the revived RH bill—and received no response. (A meeting
was later set up between the CBCP and the presidential administration, but dialogue
never really got off the ground.) Meanwhile, presidential allies in Congress,
including House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, openly endorsed the RH bill, as did
the president’s newly-appointed health secretary. The head of the CBCP, Bishop
Nereo Odchimar, predicted as early as mid-July 2010 that the Church faced an
uphill battle in opposing the RH bill.
Things
came to a head on September 30, 2010, when the Philippine Daily Inquirer and other news sources ran articles
claiming that Bishop Odchimar, in the course of an interview aired on the
Catholic Church’s Radio Veritas, had stated that excommunication for the new
president was a “proximate possibility” because of his stand over the RH bill.
In fact, the bishop had said precisely the opposite, that excommunication was not a proximate possibility and
that the Church was willing to dialogue with the president over the matter.
(The bishop had reaffirmed Church discipline regarding abortion during the
interview, and was responding to the question of whether the president would
therefore be excommunicated for supporting the RH bill, which is seen by the
pro-life movement as promoting abortifacient contraceptives.)
The
damage had been done, though. Pundits, senators, and the presidential
administration piled on the bishop and on the Church as a whole for supposedly
threatening the president. To add to the heated atmosphere, a prominent
“reproductive health” advocate by the name of Carlos Celdran dressed up as the
19th-century Philippine national hero Jose Rizal, then barged into an
ecumenical service being held in Manila Cathedral on September 30. In the
presence of Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales of Manila and the papal nuncio, Celdran
shouted insults at the clergy and demanded that the Church stay out of
politics, all the while brandishing a placard emblazoned with the word “DAMASO.”
(This is a reference to Padre Damaso, a fictional abusive friar who features in
one of Jose Rizal’s novels and whose name is popularly used in the Philippines
as an insult against Catholic clergy.)
Carlos
Celdran’s act was illegal, and he was briefly detained and then criminally
charged, but he had successfully tapped into a current of anticlericalism and
militant secularism that had long run beneath the pious externals of Filipino
society, and which had rapidly grown in the last two decades. In the worst
outburst of anticlericalism in the Philippines since at least the 1950s, newspaper
columns and editorials, opinion-makers and TV shows heaped praise on Celdran
for allegedly giving vent to national frustration against the Church over its
stances on the RH bill and on population and sexuality issues. Facebook pages
were set up to support Celdran and to enable Filipino “netizens” to say their
piece against the Church. Philippine radio stations and websites were filled
with hate-speech against the Church. A sample of the kind of “enlightened”
commentary that filled the Philippine mainstream media in those days is the
following passage by Raul Pangalangan, a former law school dean, published by
the frequently anticlerical Philippine
Daily Inquirer on October 8:
Human beings have
advanced beyond the animal stage, yet the Church will retard that evolutionary
advance and force us back to the caveman’s notion that mating is only for
breeding. They would constrain even married couples from having sex for the
old-fashioned reasons like romance and the joys of courtship and seduction.… The
irony is that the clergy unwittingly abets animalistic attitudes by insisting
that humans follow the animal practice that sex is only for producing
offspring.
Radio
and Internet postings and comments were frequently far cruder than this.
Buoyed
by the seeming public support for the RH bill and President Aquino’s apparently
invincible popularity—a popularity that prior Church support had helped to
create—RH bill advocates went on the offensive. A huge push for the bill’s
passage was led by groups such as Filipino Freethinkers (dominated by atheists,
agnostics, and liberal Christians), the dissident “Catholics for RH,” and
radical feminist organizations such as Likhaan, was abetted by professors, many
students, and alumni not just of state universities, but also of Catholic
universities such as the Jesuit-run Ateneo De Manila and the La Salle Brothers-run
De La Salle University-Manila, and was supported by many Filipino celebrities
(including Lea Salonga, once considered a devout Catholic) and by the bulk of
the Manila commentariat (a majority of whom claim to be Catholic). The Church
seemed bewildered and initially unable to answer the relentless barrage of
pro-RH criticism and propaganda that dominated the airwaves. (To be fair, individuals
from the above-mentioned Catholic universities, as well as some Jesuits and La
Salle brothers, spoke out against the RH bill, and a few columnists in secular
newspapers have defended the Church.) Even Bishop Odchimar’s repeated denials
of the excommunication “threat” attributed to him were—and continue to be—ignored
by the mainstream Filipino media. Non-Catholic and Evangelical churches have,
in the main, openly supported the RH bill, with the singularly anti-Catholic Iglesia
Ni Cristo even going so far as to condemn Natural Family Planning and to
interpret Genesis 1:28 as a command to practice birth control.
However,
Celdran’s provocative act also had the effect of awakening lay Catholics who
had previously either underestimated the threat of the RH bill, or had paid
little attention to the issues behind it. Within a week of the provocation, lay
Catholics had formed a Facebook group called “I Oppose the RH Bill,” which as
of this writing had garnered more than 23,000 “likes” and hundreds of active
members. New lay groups such as “Filipinos for Life” have been formed to
support and complement the existing pro-life apostolates of the Philippine
Church, and it can be said that the Philippine pro-life movement has never been
as strong as it is now.
THE DEBATE IN 2011
The
debate over the RH bill showed no signs of stopping in 2011. To the frustration
of the supporters of that bill, the Philippine Congress continued to delay its
passing, and this frustration found expression in continued attacks on the
Church in the media. This year there have been two nationally-televised debates
between supporters and opponents of the RH bill (with a third scheduled to be
televised), numerous Internet surveys (some won by pro-lifers, others won by
pro-RH bill supporters), and a continuing opinion-page war in print and
broadcast media as well as the Internet. Church officials and pro-life
advocates have complained time and again about the slanted and biased coverage from
all the major media networks and newspapers on matters relating to the bill, to
little avail. Both sides have also been active in sending speakers to various
schools and other institutions to discuss the pros and cons of the RH bill.
The Catholic Bishops of the Philippines issued a collective pastoral letter on
the RH bill on January 30, 2011. Entitled “Choosing Life, Rejecting the RH Bill,”
the letter laid down the position of the Church in positive language, as
follows:
We are deeply concerned
about the plight of the many poor, especially of suffering women, who are
struggling for a better life and who must seek it outside of our country, or
have recourse to a livelihood less than decent.
We are pro-life. We must
defend human life from the moment of conception or fertilization up to its
natural end.
We believe in the
responsible and natural regulation of births through Natural Family Planning,
for which character-building is necessary, which involves sacrifice, discipline,
and respect for the dignity of the spouse.
We believe that we are
only stewards of our own bodies. Responsibility over our own bodies must follow
the will of God who speaks to us through conscience.
We hold that on the
choices related to the RH bill, conscience must not only be informed but most
of all rightly guided through the teachings of one’s faith.
We believe in the freedom
of religion and the right of conscientious objection in matters that are
contrary to one’s faith. The sanctions and penalties embodied in the proposed
RH bill are one more reason for us to denounce it.
In
addition to this pastoral letter, numerous individual bishops have issued their
own pastoral letters against the RH bill. The bishops also called for an
anti-RH bill rally in Manila on March 25, which was attended by tens of
thousands of Catholics, Muslims, and Baptists. This rally was largely
downplayed in the secular media, however.
Against
the unyielding opposition of the bishops, President Aquino entrenched himself
further in his support for the RH bill. To garner public sympathy, Aquino
announced on Palm Sunday of this year that he was willing to be excommunicated
rather than give up on the RH bill. In doing this he played on all the emotions
that had been raised in the previous year’s controversy over the misreported
excommunication “threat” from the head of the CBCP. This was followed by
another heated controversy in May, when some pro-life leaders and bishops
threatened to call for civil disobedience should the RH bill be passed into
law. In response, Aquino threatened to have them charged with sedition if the
call for civil disobedience actually materialized. The irony was not lost on
some pro-lifers, who noted that Aquino’s own mother had launched a campaign of
civil disobedience against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Even
though most Filipino celebrities either remained neutral or supported the RH
bill, perhaps the biggest celebrity of them all, world boxing champion and congressman
Emmanuel “Manny” Pacquiao, has repeatedly spoken out against the RH bill and in
favor of the Church’s teaching against contraception.
Two
more controversies hit the Church in July and August of 2011 and were used by
advocates of the RH bill to push their agenda. The first was a short-lived but
intense controversy over some alleged luxury vehicles that were donated to
seven bishops by the previous administration. This was used by much of the
media and by RH advocates to take the Church to task for its supposed wealth
and corruption, until a Senate investigation found that the vehicles had been
used by the bishops mainly for outreach programs to people in the hinterlands.
The second controversy was over an artwork that defaced several images of Jesus
Christ in an extremely obscene manner, and which was displayed in the
state-funded Cultural Center of the Philippines. The Church denounced the
display, which also garnered widespread public indignation. As in the earlier uproar
over the donated vehicles, RH advocates used the controversy to attack the
Church by alleging that “Catholic Talibans” were merely out to crush freedom of
expression and to institute censorship.
As of this writing, the fate of the RH bill
continues to hang in the balance. Conventional political wisdom holds that the
RH bill is certain to pass the House of Representatives (the lower house of
Congress), while the Senate vote is more difficult to predict, with its two
most powerful leaders both rejecting the bill. (Some pro-life leaders contacted
by this author have also contested the idea that the majority of the members of
the House of Representatives will vote for the bill.) Should the RH bill pass
the Senate as well, it is certain to receive presidential approval, setting the
stage for a possible Supreme Court challenge and for vigorous protests on the
part of the Church, although the head of the bishops’ conference has dismissed
talk of civil disobedience as premature. Cardinal Ricardo Vidal (one of the
Philippines’ three cardinals) and some bishops famously spoke in 2010 of their
willingness to go to jail over the RH bill, and it remains to be seen how far President
Aquino will go to confront the Church that had been his late mother’s ally and
friend.