(The 19 authors are Dr. Bernardo
Villegas, Ph.D Economics [Harvard University]; Maria Conception Noche,
Alliance for the Family; Frank Padilla, CFC-FFL; Rolando de los Reyes,
Courage Philippines; Dr. Eleanor Palabyab, Doctors for Life; Alan
Dacanay, Families against the RH Bill; Dr. Angelita Aguirre, Family
Media Advocacy Foundation; Leonardo Montemayor, Federation of Free
Farmers; Evelina Atienza, Kababaihan ng Maynila; Joseph Tesoro, Live
Pure Movement; Eric Manalang, Pro-life Philippines; Jemy Gatdula and
Felipe Salvosa, Pro-life Professors; Dr. Raul Nidoy, Science and Reason
for Human Beings; Maribel Descallar, Teodora: In Defense of the
Authentic Woman; Kiboy Tabada, UP for Life; Luis Buenaventura III,
YUPamilya; Anthony Lumicao, Youth United for the Philippines; and
Anthony Perez, Filipinos for Life.)
There is no need for any legislation that guarantees universal access
to contraceptives, the so-called reproductive health (RH) care devices,
now or ever. Whatever “band-aid” amendments may be proposed by
well-intentioned proponents of the RH bill to make it more palatable,
the underlying principles behind it are inherently flawed.
Antisustainable growth
The first component of sustainable development is a rate of
economic growth that is high enough to contribute, together with
appropriate economic policies, to the eradication of poverty. High gross
domestic product growth is dependent on a growing and young population
as has been stated by numerous international economists and top
officials.
The just released Global Competitiveness Report 2012 of the World
Economic Forum, like the HSBC 2012 Report, had the Philippines jumping
several notches up in economic competitiveness because of our large,
growing population.
Population control, however, will backfire and cause the
acceleration of our falling fertility rate. Many pro-RH proponents harp
on the dangers of population explosion. They have not learned from the
lessons of the last two centuries of unparalleled economic progress in
many countries of the East and the West that have disproved the
Malthusian theory of perpetual poverty caused by the so-called geometric
growth of population.
New resources
The unlimited capacity of the human mind to discover new
resources and technologies has overcome the “limits to growth” that
sowed fears in the last century.
Some of the greatest minds of the 20th century such as Nobel
laureates Simon Kuznets and Michael Spence; Dr. Mahbub ul Haq, creator
of the development index; and resource specialists Colin Clark and
Julian Simon have shown through cross-country studies and long-term
analyses of the economic experiences of developed countries that
population growth was a positive stimulus to economic progress and that
it was surpassed by the growth in real income.
Economists who purport to show the opposite have for their sample
very few countries. They also have access to data over a relatively
short period compared with the studies showing that there is no
correlation between population growth and the spread of mass poverty,
which is due to erroneous economic policies and failure of good
governance.
Even those few countries in which there is some evidence that
birth control policies temporarily helped in boosting economic growth in
the short run are now regretting their fertility reduction programs.
Well-known are the attempts of the leaders of Singapore, Taiwan, South
Korea, Hong Kong and Japan to appeal to their women to bear more babies.
Premarital sex, abortion
Since material well-being is not the only component of human
development or happiness, there is another problem that widespread use
of contraceptives can unleash. The findings of Nobel laureate George
Akerlof who, despite his protestations that he was in favor of abortion
and artificial contraception, demonstrated with empirical evidence that
the “reproductive technology shock” led to an increase in premarital
sex, and due to contraceptive failure, also in unwed mothers, children
without fathers and other societal ills.
A 2009 University of Pennsylvania study,
titled “Sexual Revolution,” showed that premarital sex in the United
States ballooned from 0.06 percent of women in 1900 to 75 percent today
as contraception provided the youth the ease of sex without “cost” or
responsibility.
False sense of security
This same link with premarital sex was also
suggested by the studies by JE Potter in Brazil, and clearly seen by
the work of Dr. Edward Green in Africa. Green, former director of the
AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard University, affirmed that
“condoms have not worked as a primary intervention in the
population-wide epidemics of Africa,” citing studies at the Lancet,
Science and British Medical Journal and explaining that the availability
of condoms led to earlier and riskier sex by creating a false sense of
security.
As the contraceptive mentality sets in
(contra = against; conception = beginning of human beings), a negative
view of human beings is promoted. A 2011 study in the scientific journal
Contraception showed that the rise in contraceptive use in Spain also
saw a jump in abortion rate. This link—both logical and empirical—has
been acknowledged by leaders of the abortion industry, such as Malcolm
Potts, the first medical director of International Planned Parenthood.
Only five nations in the world still
prohibit abortion. A hundred years ago all nations did. It was
acceptance of contraception that changed their minds. This will happen
here, too, if we accept contraception.
Secularist ideology
Another serious flaw in the RH bill is the
sweeping generalization about “unwanted pregnancies.” Scientific studies
in the United States, especially those by Lant Pritchett of Harvard
University, have seriously questioned the assumption made by pro-RH bill
advocates that unwanted pregnancies among married women are rampant.
The finding of social scientists is that mothers have the number of
children they want.
Surveys in the Philippines that purport to
show that there are many mothers among poor households, who regret
having given birth to some of their children, are suspect. These surveys
are usually funded by international organizations that have a strong
bias for population control.
Obama administration
It is no secret that in the Democratic
National Convention, the Obama administration made it clear that there
will be continuing support for abortion. One does not have to be
paranoid to assume that if President Obama wins a second term, he and
his Secretary of State will continue to target countries like the
Philippines to spread their culture of death.
Besides being part of an ideological
interpretation of “women’s rights,” such aggressive campaign to promote
reproductive health (which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton averred
“includes access to abortion”) continues the US-supported worldwide
program that was unleashed by the National Security Study Memorandum
200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and
Overseas Interests.
Considering the revelations about the
participation of foreign interests in lobbying for the RH bill, any
version of it will be suspect.
Let us not be naïve. Only last year, Green,
through his book “Broken Promises,” exposed in brilliant detail how the
West’s AIDS establishment disowned scientific evidence that wide condom
use was in fact ineffective in stopping AIDS in Africa, and how those
who dominate it—the homosexual ideologues, population controllers and
condom suppliers—worsened the epidemic and betrayed the developing
world.
Taking away funds for poor
Besides being the antithesis to sustainable
economic growth and human development, the RH bill also unwittingly
goes against inclusive growth, i.e. economic progress that benefits the
poorest among the poor.
It misdiagnoses the reason households of
larger family sizes are poorer than those with fewer children. Studies
have shown that households with larger family sizes are poorer not
because they have too many children but because their heads are the
least educated. This should lead policymakers not to convince these
poor households to have fewer children, but to invest more resources in
their education, especially the women, a proposal that is strongly
supported by the studies of Economics Nobel laureates Amartya Sen and
Gary Becker.
Improve basic education
Government should divert whatever is
budgeted for contraceptives to improving the quality of basic education
among the poor. Poor households, especially in the rural areas, choose
to have more children because human beings are their only resources,
especially considering the failure of the state to provide farmers with
infrastructure.
The poor farmers will suffer manpower
shortages in their labor-intensive farming if they start imitating the
rich in having only one or two children. The same applies to those
millions of households that have at least one of its immediate members
working abroad. Seducing them to have fewer children could very well
leave them even more destitute, as publications of the UN and Asian
Development Bank have predicted.
Disseminating a contraceptive mentality
among the poor unmasks a condescending and elitist attitude that the
poor should not be allowed to multiply. This policy is dangerously close
to the eugenics practiced by authoritarian leaders like Adolf Hitler.
Considering that the competitive advantage
of the Philippines in the global economy is its young, growing
population, a really propoor economic strategy should allow the poor to
choose to have as many children as they wish and then to generously
support them with infrastructure, educational and technical skills
training, and microcredit support, among other things, so that they can
turn their children into truly productive resources.
Suspect surveys
Those who support the RH bill refer to
surveys purporting to show that there is a large demand for free
contraceptives among the poor. As mentioned, these surveys are suspect
because they are funded by international agencies advocating
contraception and abortion. Questionnaires are formulated to influence
respondents to give the desired answers.
A recent consumer survey conducted among
the C, D and E households (constituting more than 60 percent of
households) by SEED Institute, a field research group, came out with
more objective data about the demand for contraceptives among mothers in
poor households in Metro Manila.
Wish list
The survey was conducted to identify the
consumer patterns of the poor with the intention of giving guidelines to
profit-making firms and social enterprises about what goods and
services could be tailored specifically to the needs of the poor. The
respondents (all mothers) were asked to list down the top three goods or
services that they most wanted the government to provide for free after
they exhausted their resources to meet their most basic needs. Among
more than 20 goods or services on their wish lists, there was no mention
whatsoever of “free contraceptives.”
The Philippine Medical Association also
asserted that the goal of reducing maternal and child deaths “could be
attained by improving maternal and child health care without the
necessity of distributing contraceptives. The millions of [pesos]
intended for contraceptive devices may just well be applied in improving
the skills of our health workers.”
Provoking moral crisis
Several religious groups, Muslim,
Protestant and Catholic, oppose the RH measure on moral grounds. Belying
pro-RH surveys, these groups, together with other people of goodwill,
have rallied by the thousands in many cities and towns around the
country, and have contributed in winning post-debate polls on national
television.
The Imam Council of the Philippines,
leaders of our 4.5 million Muslims, pronounced that contraceptives “make
us lose morality.” Throughout the centuries, the Catholic Church has
taught that contraception is intrinsically evil. Pope John Paul the
Great wrote that contraception “leads not only to a positive refusal to
be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of
conjugal love.”
It is, therefore, advisable that Congress
refrain from passing a law that would oblige citizens who adhere to
their religion to fund an item which they consider immoral. Considering
the strong arguments against the RH bill based on secular sciences, it
would be prudent for the state not to provoke a religious-moral crisis
among a large majority of the Filipino population.
Need for virtue
Lastly, two Asian intellectuals spoke of
the virtue needed by a nation. Speaking of the “crime” of contraception,
Mahatma Gandhi taught: “Even as many people will be untruthful and
violent, humanity may not lower its standard, so also, though many, even
the majority, may not respond to the message of self-control, we may
not lower our standard.”
Jose Rizal wrote: “Only virtue can save! If
our country has ever to be free, it will not be through vice and crime,
it will not be so by corrupting its sons, deceiving some and bribing
others, no! Redemption presupposes virtue, virtue sacrifice and
sacrifice love!”
