HOUSE SEES RH BILL OKAY; SENATE VOWS TO BLOCK IT

By Christine F. Herrera The principal author of the reproductive health bill on Sunday said an endorsement from President Benigno Aquino III has pushed the number of its supporters to 140, more than enough to approve the contentious measure by Aug. 7, when the debates were expected to close. Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman said the bill needed to be passed by August because Congress would be preoccupied with the deliberations on next year’s national budget by September and the filing of the candidacies for the mid-term 2013 elections by October. Although the President only mentioned the term “responsible parenthood” once during his State-of-the-Nation Address last week in reference to his administration’s plans for education, Lagman took that as an endorsement of his bill. “The message of the President was loud and clear. It’s not in the length of what he said but the content of what he said,” Lagman said. “We have been saying that we have the numbers, and most especially now that President Aquino endorsed it.” Lagman said he was optimistic that the debates, which have delayed a long-awaited vote on the bill, would likely be terminated soon. While 104 lawmakers were signatories to the bill, Lagman said, their supporters had grown to 140. The other lawmakers did not want their identities known to prevent the Catholic bishops, who vehemently oppose the bill, from pressuring them, Lagman said. “The House has extensively and adequately discussed and debated the RH bill since the interpellations started on May 17, 2011. We have been debating it for more than a year now,” said Pangasinan Rep. Kimi Cojuangco, one of the authors of the bill. “It is time we terminate the debate and proceed to amendments and approval.” House Deputy Majority Leader and Iloilo Rep. Janette Garin said Congress had been debating various versions of the bill for the last 11 years. “Fifteen mothers are dying daily from pregnancy-related complications, and millions of Filipinos wanting better quality of life should be listened to,” Garin said. “We owe it to our people to vote on this so that government resources and time can be used wisely and appropriately.” If the plenary voted to end the debates, Lagman said, it could proceed to the period of amendments and subject the bill to a second and then third and final reading, Lagman said. Lagman denied a Catholic Church claim that the bill’s P3-billion funding would all go toward buying contraceptives. “The bulk of the funding would go to a massive information campaign to be spearheaded by the local government units to inform the couples about the natural and modern methods and how to plan their families through birth spacing,” Lagman said. “We respect religious beliefs so we included the natural method. But it should be legal and not abortive, medically safe and truly effective.” Lagman said neither the Church nor the State had the right to impose on couples which family planning method to use. He said the bill was not a magic bullet that would immediately slow the country’s rapid population growth, but it would eventually have an impact on education, food, jobs, housing and the environment. But Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile on Sunday said those saying the RH bill was not about population control were “liars’ and predicted it will have a tough time in the Senate. “This is indeed a population control in the guise of a health bill. No question about it,” Enrile told dzBB radio. But Senator Pia Cayetano, the principal author of the Senate version of the bill, said she remained confident that she could convince her colleagues to pass the measure. The supporters of the bill have criticized the delays introduced by those who oppose to it, saying that with more than a year in plenary debates behind them, the time was ripe for a vote. Senate Majority Floor Leader Vicente Sotto III, who opposes the bill, assured Cayetano that the bill would be put into vote in the last week of August or the first week of September. With Macon R. Araneta Catholics, condoms and the RH bill | Inquirer Opinion Rina Jimenez-David Well, what do you know… It seems that President Benigno Aquino III’s brief mention, almost in passing, in his State of the Nation Address of the importance of “responsible parenthood” lit a fire under the bottoms of the House and Senate leadership. Now the long-delayed Reproductive Health bill is “on the verge” of passage, at least according to the long-suffering lobby groups, and it’s all hands on deck! Tomorrow, the plenary debate in the House of Representatives begins and will end on Wednesday, after which voting is expected to commence. Supporters are urged to show up en masse at the House, wearing purple shirts or white shirts with purple accessories (purple is considered the color of the women’s movement). They are also asked to “tweet or Facebook pro-RH legislators to attend sessions” and otherwise badger all those who signed on as cosponsors to show up and make their presence count. Of course, the Catholic bishops and their adherents, all those who believe in keeping Filipino women “barefoot and pregnant,” can be expected to wage their own counterattack. But since everything that can be said has been said on this long-delayed bill, I think the House and the Senate are more than ready to finally vote on the measure. Just a reminder, though: The Filipino public has long made its sentiments on reproductive health heard and loudly articulated. The only question remaining is: Who do our legislators listen to? Will it be the Filipino people, as expressed in public opinion surveys dating back to well over a decade? Or will it be a small elite composed of Church folk and their supporters? Congress is reaching the crossroads, and let’s hope it proceeds in the right direction. * * * While we’re on the topic, I do still hold out hope that our Filipino bishops and their followers on the issue of reproductive health will come around to changing their minds and easing their vociferous opposition to the idea of giving women (and men) the means to decide their reproductive fate. I say this because Pope Benedict XVI did say in 2010 that using condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS can be “a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.” This was, wrote Jon O’Brien in a recent issue of “rd” or Religion Dispatches, a daily online magazine, “a great leap forward for the Catholic Church,” which previously condemned the promotion of condom use (deeming condoms “immoral”) even to prevent the spread of disease. Before I go on to discuss O’Brien’s article, titled “The Truth About Catholics and Condoms,” let me clarify here that O’Brien (whom I have met personally) is the president of Catholics for Choice and a leader of the “Condoms4Life” campaign, just so you’d know where he’s coming from. And that “rd” says it provides “a forum for journalists, scholars and advocates to share their expertise and inform the conversations that shape our lives and our democracy.” Judging from its lineup of articles, “rd” seems to cover a wide range of beliefs and opinions. * * * The Pope’s statement, says O’Brien, could have meant “not only that Catholics could feel comfortable using this tried-and-tested HIV prevention method, but that many Catholic-run health care centers might start incorporating condoms into their official HIV prevention programs.” But even after the Pope affirmed the use of condoms to help prevent the spread of HIV, “we still hear some members of the Catholic hierarchy trying to take back the Pope’s words and doing their best to prevent condoms from reaching people who need them.” Some bishops sought to reinterpret the Pope’s statement, with some applying it only to a narrow scope in his original message, insisting that Benedict was speaking of a hypothetical situation regarding a male prostitute. But incredibly, the Vatican held fast to the Pope’s original meaning. Vatican spokesperson Fr. Federico Lombardi “confirmed that the Pope intended his words to apply whether ‘you’re a woman, a man, or a transsexual.’” But what O’Brien finds equally important is that the Pope chose “as his first example an individual who really exists. There are indeed sex workers all over the world, male and female.” Reflects O’Brien: “A living, compassionate Church acknowledges realities like these and asks: what are the moral choices available for such a person?” Worldwide, writes O’Brien, the Catholic Church provides approximately 25 percent of all AIDS care, and yet, “the principle of the Pope’s words has yet to trickle down into practice.” And while Catholic health care has provided anti-retroviral treatments to thousands, “it balks at one challenge: helping people live long, healthy lives as sexual beings.” * * * “The issue is to protect life,” says South African Bishop Kevin Dowling, whose diocese “has been devastated by AIDS deaths.” Many Catholics agree, with a 2007 poll finding that the majority of Catholics in five countries agree that “using condoms is pro-life because it helps save lives.” We’re not just talking about HIV/AIDS and condoms here, I believe. The benefits of reproductive health services have long been established, and their necessity, in light of our worsening data on child and maternal health, need no longer be proven. O’Brien says that “the hierarchy’s reluctance to acknowledge facts already grasped by ordinary Catholics is nothing new.” Neither is the power of Church leaders to stand as obstacles to change, even if that change is beneficial to society and to human beings. We can only pray that the bishops look deep into their hearts and consciences to acknowledge that condoms—and the whole range of reproductive health services—can and do save lives. That condoms and reproductive health are in fact life-affirming. _______________________________________________ THE DICTATOR