Unforgiven

While I was recuperating, I spent most of my time at home looking up and catching up with my friends and colleagues. Among my college friends, topics of our conversations focus on how our lives are going. They share tales about their families and jobs, which I listen to with genuine interest. Among my friends in the NGO sector, our conversations focus on our lives that seem to be inextricably intertwined with our respective advocacies.

Friends doing HIV/AIDS work bemoan the lack of funding for prevention projects, the demise of some NGOs, and one organization’s bullying of other smaller NGOs over funds and micro-management in project implementation.

But what has really caught my attention is the recent spate of challenges that reproductive health (RH) advocates are facing these days. The Reproductive Health Care Act has been languishing in the Philippine Congress for many years now, largely due to the opposition of the Catholic church.

Perhaps sensing that advocacy efforts towards getting the bill passed are slowly gaining success, the Catholic church in the Philippines is now vigorously fighting the passage of this bill. This is nothing new; after all, the church in the Philippines has always ignored the constitutional separation of church and state by meddling in governance and political affairs, with varying results (and depending on who you ask).

However, the thing that bothers me is the ferocity with which the church’s protests against this bill is being undertaken. Of course, one can say that this is, again, nothing new. Our national hero, Dr. Jose P. Rizal, had even documented this type of blullying in his novels–wherein priests threatened people who didn’t agree with them with excommunication, or when public officials bow to the priests’ whims in exchange for ‘blessing’ their political candidacies.

Now, more than a hundred years later, RH advocates in congress who are Catholics are being threatened with excommunication in varying degrees, ranging from denying them the sacraments of the Holy Eucharist and Matrimony to threatening their political careers and to outright name-calling as ‘the enemies of good’. The president herself panders to the church (and to other sources of power, in fact) for her own political gain in spite of the fact that she had publicly admitted using contraceptive pills when she was younger. Some things never change.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t end here. What bothers me more is the depth of the misinformation that the church is doing to ensure that this groundbreaking law will become unpopular with the masses, who do not have access to accurate information on not just the bill but on reproductive health itself. A friend managed to attend a number of church-based and church-organized activities and she was appalled at the degree of misinformation that is being spread about the law. As you can see on the photo below, the bill itself is being distorted to fit the church’s misinformed concept of reproductive health.

Old and obsolete studies are being quoted as fact, while data from evidenced-based researches are being distorted to fit the argument that passing this law will supposedly lead to the destruction of the Filipino family. Contraceptive methods are being discredited using inaccurate and non-scientific facts and the bill’s provisions are being misinterpreted deliberately. Imagine that.

As I am writing this, a group of concerned Catholics organized themselves to speak out for reproductive health. Some NGO worker-friends expressed that social movements like this should be allowed to happen spontaneously, and not in this seemingly choreographed manner–with media persons in the background taking soundbites and photos. In my opinion, desperate times like this calls for urgent measures, spontaneous or not.

I can only wish the RH advocates well. I hope the politicians who are supporting the passage of this bill remain steadfast and strong, threats to their souls and political careers notwithstanding.