aide memoire

Aide Memoire on RH Legislation
The arguments of the Catholic Church against the RH can be summarized in the following points:
1. This legislation promotes contraception, a moral evil that the Catholic Church condemns. The marital act when contracepted falsifies the expression of love between couples by separating its unitive from its procreative aspect.
2. Interpellation on HB 5043 has revealed that the bills (at both houses) were largely drafted by Philippine Legislative Committee on Population and Development, a foreign funded NGO. Since contraception has never been banned in the Philippines this legislation is pushing open a door that has been wide open for the past 50 years. This raises two basic issues:
a. The false promises of family planning: after 50 years it has not made any significant improvements in the poverty situation of our country. Documentation on family planning programs world-wide has unearthed a lot of evidence connecting these programs to several ideologies—the racist ideology of the American Eugenics Society, the feminist ideology which wants to women to enjoy sex free of the burdens of child-bearing as well as the economic imperialism of the US that looks at the population growth of third world countries as a threat to their economic security. All these ideologies hide behind the high-sounding altruistic motive of pushing family planning as a solution to the poverty problem. Unfortunately this same poverty argument is also popular among politicians for another reason: it provides an easy reason to cover-up for their mistakes and failures and above all for the misuse of funds in graft and corruption.
b. The family planning program has traditionally been financed by private foreign aid (International Planned Parenthood) going to private NGOs (Family Planning Program of the Philippines and bilateral and multilateral aid (USAID, UNFPA). This legislation now empowers the Philippine Govt. to spend tax money on family planning. Hence family planning does not need an enabling act; ergo the purpose of the legislation is to transfer the funding of family planning to the Philippine Govt. This would impinge on the freedom of religion of the 80% Catholic population who will then be paying with their tax money for a program that violates their freedom of conscience.
3. Both House and Senate versions promote value free sex education that violates the constitutional rights of the parents to educate their children. A value-free sex education that is exclusively limited to the biological dimension of the conjugal act and omits its spiritual, religious and moral dimensions will give rise to promiscuity among young people and eventually destroy our society.
4. Although the proposed legislation avows that it does not support legalization of abortion the UN language it uses in defining Reproductive Health provides an escape hatch for future legislation to decriminalize abortion. The inclusion of mental and social well-being UN definition of Reproductive Health together with the insistence that woman should have equal access to a safe and satisfying sexual life has been used to justify not only contraception but also abortion as a remedy to failed contraception. This is an approach that the UN has used to successfully achieve the legalization of abortion in many Catholic countries.
5. The RH legislation also contains provisions that violate the freedom of religion of Catholic health workers and public officials who are forced to provide family planning services to whoever asks for it; likewise of Catholic employers forcing them to provide family planning services to their employees, hence forcing them to be accomplices in something that is against their religion.
6. The items listed in n. 5 above and the provision of information against family planning are prohibited acts that will be penalized by imprisonment or fine. The prohibition of talking against the family planning program under pain of imprisonment or payment of a fine is against the constitutional freedom of speech which every Filipino should enjoy.
7. The UN generally misleads many nations by focusing on population growth (for the Philippines this is 1.97% in 2005) and fertility (for the Philippines this is now down to 2.89 children per woman—too close to the 2.1 replacement rate). What they omit mentioning is that many countries of the world are now imploding (negative population growth rate (Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.). Due to a rapid fall in fertility and rise in life expectancy many of these countries are aging fast even as their labor force is shrinking. The Philippines is a striking exception to this demographic phenomenon. The main reason for this is our continuing rejection of family planning, an edge that we will certainly loose if the RH legislation passes.

Natural law dictates the disappearance of species that do not reproduce. Human beings are not exempted from this law. Hence, from a broader perspective a sincere seeker for the truth will see in the demographic implosion of the countries which have embraced anti-life attitudes the evident working of this natural law.