sophism

Masterpiece of Sophism

Written by Tony F. Roxas Monday, 30 November 2009 18:16

WORDS are not just tools of ordinary day-¬to-¬day communication—they can be powerful weapons of persuasion, especially when packaged neatly and alluringly in well-camouflaged sophisms. This article aims to pinpoint, expose and refute some of those concealed underlying sophisms in the controversial Reproductive Health (RH) Bill 5043.
In doing so, much hope rests on the likelihood that the majority of RH bill supporters, both in and out of Congress, are only honestly mistaken about the wisdom and necessity of the bill. It is for them and for those who oppose this bill that this piece is primarily intended. As for the minority of RH bill supporters who persist in their untenable position, it is hoped that there may be some window left for the light of objective truth to enter.
Among the key arguments on which the RH and Sex Education bills in the Philippines are anchored are the following:
1) RH education is a human right.
2) RH education is one way to help alleviate poverty.
3) RH education gives women the right to exercise their freedom of informed choice, an important human right.
Let us tackle them one by one.
RH education actually violates human rights
Setting the stage for the legalization of abortion, or in conjunction with it, as can be inferred from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent statement to the US Congress on the Obama administration’s interpretation of the term “Reproductive Health”—that it includes women’s reproductive rights to “safe” abortion, reproductive-health education is being forced into the educational curricula of developing countries, with the usual “human rights” shield being cited as grounds for its necessity and urgency.
But just how logically valid really is this RH education claim of being a human right? Foreign and local proponents of this bill overlook, fail or refuse to see and acknowledge the inherent relationships of different human rights to one another. In so doing, all sorts of highly destructive social consequences follow.
It is an axiomatic truth that human rights exist only because human life exists! If human life did not exist, there would be no human rights, not even a single right to assert, protect, speak or even think of.
Obviously, if all the human rights were gathered and arranged in their order of importance, the right to life would be the highest of all because, as already said, it is the reality of human life that makes all other rights exist. For this reason, the right to life is the principal and all¬encompassing right.
All other lesser rights exist only for the exclusive purpose of supporting the right to life, enriching it, and protecting and strengthening it. Hence, we have man’s basic right to food security because it supports life, his right to education because it enriches his rational life with knowledge and basic skills needed for total human development, and his right to the laws of the land that protect and strengthen the right to life.
Furthermore, any so¬-called rights that do the very opposite—weakening and not supporting the right to life; corrupting and poisoning the tender minds of children with a contraceptive culture and not enriching their rational life; and endangering or destroying the right to life and not protecting and strengthening it—are rights only in name but not in reality. Such “rights” do not have any moral existence!
Therefore, any and all provisions of RH Bill 5043 and all similar provisions found in all bills on sex education and all other related bills containing such nonexistent rights, because they are naturally unjust per se, are absolutely null and void ab initio, and can never be enacted validly into any just law!
Essential and universal cause of poverty
Foreign interests that insist and strive hard to aggressively control our population growth most often claim that an increase in family size is a cause of poverty. Now, if it is true that a family becomes poor or poorer precisely because of an increase in family size, then it would follow that all families that increase in family size will always end up poor or poorer in the end. But this is clearly not the case because while it is true that some families end up poor or poorer, there are also some that end up even richer in the end, while there are also some that end up about the same as when they began. Therefore, it is not true that an increase in family size is per se a cause of poverty.
In fact, no less than two Nobel Laureates in Economics, Gary Backer and Simon Kuznets, and Resource Economist Julian Simon say the same thing. They emphasize that there is no scientific evidence proving that an increase in family size is a cause of poverty.
What then is the real cause of poverty? The essential, immediate, direct and universal cause of poverty is non¬productivity or insufficient productivity!
Consequently, if any foreign or local interests sincerely want to help solve our poverty problems, they can best do so by helping provide skills, training, education and livelihood projects which will surely uplift the economic conditions of the poor, and not insist on flooding poor families with pills and condoms which only result in the end in damage to the mother’s health and/or the slaying of the unborn. To paraphrase what one writer once wisely said, productivity, not pills, condoms or abortions, will end poverty!

RH Bill 5043 denies women the right to freedom of choice
Let’s face it. “Freedom of choice” is a catch phrase these days that is frequently invoked to rationalize even the most rapacious, unnatural and indefensible agendas.
The economic pundits clearly responsible for the global financial meltdown that’s adversely affecting countries around the world and millions and millions of people claim that they were only exercising their “freedom of choice” to engage in business.
Also, all the billions of inhabitants of this planet for the past 100 years or so exercised their freedom of choice to use petroleum¬-based products as their main source of energy and fuel. Did our freedom of choice make right the now-almost irreversible damage we have inflicted on our ecology? Obviously not!
Clearly, there is more to the freedom of choice than just exercising it. One must exercise this right responsibly. And this can be attained only if the meaning of freedom is clearly understood by the one suggesting and by the one exercising it.
Freedom has a twofold meaning, one negative and the other positive. The negative meaning of freedom is the absence of restraint. One is not free to swim, for instance, if his hands and feet are tied or bound. To be free to swim, his hands and feet should be untied. Or, he must have the absence of restraint on him, i.e., he must have negative freedom.
However, even if his hands and feet are not tied, if he does not know how to swim, he still is not free to swim. To be truly free, he must have the skill or know¬-how of swimming. In short, he must have positive freedom, the presence of a skill or ability to do something. Only then can one be truly free to swim. True freedom, therefore, means having both positive freedom and negative freedom.
In regard to the exercise of the freedom of choice, before one insists on freedom from restraint to exercise this right of negative freedom, one must recognize that there is a prior right and duty to learn how to choose correctly (positive freedom). Otherwise, freedom will be misused, as white-collar criminals of Wall Street have destroyed our world economy, and petro¬chemical firms and the billions of inhabitants of this planet who believed them have destroyed our ecology.
RH Bill 5043 promotes an irresponsible exercise of the freedom of choice: Negative freedom without positive freedom
Since the right to safety and the preservation of good health is an essential natural and fundamental human right second only to the right to life, no man-made laws or institutions can legitimately nullify, suspend, replace or violate it any more than can all the nations of the world pass laws that will eliminate or repeal the law of gravity!
Hence, a woman who wants to space childbirths is entitled by natural right to methods of child spacing that are guaranteed absolutely safe, not just “advertised” as safe by supposed medical experts in the service of pharmaceutical firms.
But since only natural family-planning methods are guaranteed for their safety, then only such methods may be offered and taught to them, whether by the government, foreign-funded institutions, or private individuals and groups. The Billings Ovulation Method with its proven 99.98-percent success rate even for irregular fertility cycles is one such method.
In promoting the use of artificial contraceptives, RH Bill 5043 fails or refuses to divulge to possible users the dangers to life and health such contraceptives bring!
Fortunately, of the abundant scientific evidence showing the dangers to life and health through the use of contraceptives, no less than Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Heath, the highest medical authority promoting the population-control program worldwide, asserts this:
“It is, therefore, concluded that risk of adenomatous carcinomas of the cervix is increased in women who use oral contraceptives, that this risk is greatest in long-term users and users of high-progestin potency products, and that the enhanced risk diminishes with the passage of time after cessation of use.” (David B. Thomas, Roberts M. Ray, and the World Health Organization Study of Neoplasia and Steroid Contraceptives; Oral Contraceptives and Invasive Adenocarcinomas and Adenosquamous Carcinomas of the Uterine Cervix, American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 144, No. 3, page 288, Copyright 1996 by the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health).
And yet the RH bill, with the support of its foreign sponsors and local counterparts, insists on letting our female population of reproductive age use these dangerous and unsafe birth-control methods, defying comprehension and scuttling all sense of humaneness.
In conclusion, RH Bill 5043 denies Filipino women the right to exercise authentic freedom of choice because it only wants them to exercise negative freedom, the absence of restraint, without the corresponding positive freedom, the ability to choose correctly, because the truth about the dangers these contraceptives bring to the life and health of possible users is hidden from them.
In short, this RH bill wants our Filipino women to exercise the “freedom” of misinformed choice!
Conclusion
In the light of the foregoing arguments, all three grounds for the so-called necessity and urgency of the RH bill have been shown to be flawed, invalid and irrelevant to its intended conclusion. The only inescapable course of action left then is to reject and disapprove this controversial bill because the grounds it cites in no way justify its existence.
And to put things finally in the right perspective, the prolife cause is not a unique or exclusive concern of the Roman Catholic faith. It is a cause deeply rooted in natural law, and is, therefore, the concern of all men of goodwill who uphold, protect and defend the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person, whether believers or not, in the existence of God or in the afterlife. It is the same natural moral law whose binding effect on the conscience of mankind was invoked and strongly enforced in the historic trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg after World War II for the mass extermination of Jews, all crimes against humanity. And it is the same natural law that is the moral bedrock upon which the United Nations organization was founded. Hence, its universal and pervasive binding effect on the conscience of mankind as it is the ultimate source of natural moral rights, now called human rights, and the guarantor and protector of the Right to Life.