UPDATED: Q&A on Economic and Demographic Aspects of the RH Bill

The following is the updated version as of September 8, 2012. I had previously uploaded the version of September 8, 2011. Many thanks to Dr. Roberto De Vera for the updated text. Q & A on Economic and Demographic Aspects of the Reproductive Health Bill

Handbooks of Truths Behind the RH Bill

Published online on September 15, 2012.


Handbook of Truths Behind the R.H. Bill v.1

From the Ateneo: an academic article on the correlation between abortion and contraception

The article was first published earlier this year and is authored by two distinguished Jesuits with extensive secular professional credentials and a lay professor of the Ateneo De Manila University: Fr. Romeo Intengan (former Provincial Superior of the Philippine Jesuits, co-founder of the Philippine Democratic Socialist Party and a UP-trained Doctor of Medicine), Fr. Daniel J. McNamara SJ (a physicist by training, former Superior and Director of the Manila Observatory) and Dr. Quirino Sugon Jr. (a Theoretical Physicist in Manila Observatory). 

As the abstract states, this article sets out to propose a set of hypotheses for deriving the abortion rate as a function of the intercourse interval in weeks, the number of weeks since the start of first intercourse, the number weeks of pregnancy, the number of weeks of breastfeeding, and the contraceptive failure rate. We also propose risk compensation as feedback: the intercourse interval is proportional to the mth power of the contraceptive failure rate. We show that for different values of m, the abortion rate may become smaller, bigger, or remain the same compared to the case when no contraceptives are used. Thus, one way to settle the RH Bill debate is to determine the correct value of m derived from accurate data on the reproductive health parameters of a large sample of the female population. If this data is not available, it is better not to take risk in approving the bill, because there is a possibility of increasing our national abortion rate through the promotion of contraceptives. Instead, it may be better to use alternative methods to manage our population and reduce our abortion rate to zero by promoting chastity before marriage, late marriages, and breastfeeding—and accepting each child conceived as a gift and not as a burden.

Estimating Abortion Rates From Contraceptive Failure Rates via Risk Compensation: A Mathematical Model

A UP Diliman Professor's Campaign for Life and Against the RH Bill

(NEWER ARTICLES BELOW. THIS ARTICLE WILL STAY HERE UNTIL AUGUST 1)

The Catholic Position on the RH Bill congratulates Dr. Aliza Racelis, Associate Professor in UP Diliman, whose speech at the UP Diliman University Council meeting earlier this month, we are told, dealt a setback to the plans of pro-RH professors to get the Council to issue an official statement supporting the RH Bill. It was sent back to the drafters, and it is not yet clear if it will be issued at all. 

Apparently, during her speech Dr. Racelis focused on the following arguments: 1) the RH bill is anti-women and 2) the lack of moral consciousness exemplified by the RH Bill

The first point was already elaborated by Dr. Racelis on the following webpage:

RH Bill: Hindi Para sa Kababaihan

And the second point in the following:

Comprehensive RH Bill Action Forum

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Other webpages featured on Dr. Racelis' page that have a bearing on the RH bill are:

On Population and Development: Family, Human Capital and Sustainable Economic Development

Positive Dimensions of Population Growth

Natural Law arguments against the 'RH Bill"

Suggested Modules for RH Bill Orientations

Finally, the Truth about the RH Bill

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These webpages feature useful slides, data and illustrations. 

For the record: Fr. Gregory Gaston on World Population Collapse

World Population Collapse: Lessons for the Philippines

Gregory D. Gaston 

Reproduced with Permission 

Original WORD file and charts 

Original PDF file

A hundred countries today face increasing economic, socio-cultural, political and security problems while their populations age and start to decline, a result of Total Fertility Rates (TFR´s) falling below replacement levels since the 1960´s. As their population pyramid gradually becomes inverted, their ageing workforce, which foresees little replacement, needs to support a growing number of elderly. To resolve these difficulties, their governments desperately encourage their citizens to raise more children. If ever they succeed, their few working people in the future will be doubly burdened, as they must support not only the many elderly they already have, but also the many children they wish to have.

All this the Philippines will also have to experience after its fertility rate sinks to levels below replacement by 2025, brought about by today´s general trend of parents bearing less children, coupled with increasing emigration of individuals and families. It would be pointless to abandon the normal population pyramid we still have today, and then, like rich countries at present, wish to regain it by all means.

A serious study of the latest world demographic data will reject population control as a quick-fix solution to poverty in the Philippines, and hopefully encourage efforts towards good governance, both in the public and the private sectors: steps that will allow the Philippines to take full advantage of its rich human resources, which it can share to ageing countries desperately in need of them. 


(CLICK HERE TO READ MORE)

Philippine Population: What's the issue?

The following introduction is adapted from Facebook comments by Dr. Quesada's son, Leo:

The following article by Dr. Ramon Quesada provides empirical data from the time of the Marcos administration to the present regarding population growth rate vis-a-vis population control policies and efforts. More importantly, it provides a cross-sectional analysis throughout the provinces in the Philippines with regard population and per capita income. The article is written in simple terms, easily accessible to the layman.

Ramon Quesada also has a Masters Degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Connecticut. He graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University with a degree in AB Economics after shortly turning 18 years old (!). He was the former Executive Director of the Strategic Business Economics Program, and is well-traveled internationally (including Nigeria and Pyongyang, N.Korea) and locally. Under that program, he would give mid-year and year-end economic briefings to numerous company officers and CEO's, bank officers, etc.

Major Filipino Jesuit theologian speaks out versus the RH Bill

From the website of the Loyola School of Theology:

RH Bill vs. Five Levels of Self-Transcendence
Walter Ysaac, S.J.

The Reproductive Health (RH) bill is “a mindset and a value system” that are “secularist, materialistic, individualistic and hedonistic in the guise of development and modernity.” Thus, according to the CBCP statement during the “dialogue” meeting last May 10, 2011 (Philippine Star, May 11, 2011, pp.1 and 3), even the good provisions of the Responsible Parenthood (alias RH) bill are “inextricably woven” with the “bad provisions.” Example, it would include authorizing the government buying with taxpayers’ money artificial contraceptives that are already doubtful with regard to being abortifacient or dangerous to health of mother and child and father and to good family relationships, and distributing them upon request to anybody until prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration.

But the main defect and danger of the RP (“Responsible” Parenthood) bill is that it is imposed on the people, particularly the poor, by a government without regard for the culture or “world mediated by meanings and motivated by values” of the Filipino people. To really develop and update or “modernize” a people is to make them transcend and sublate themselves from the level of their experience to that of their understanding to that of their judgment to that of their decision up even to the highest level of their unconditional love which is a pure gift of God to us and can only be attained through authentic prayer or truly living relationship with God.

Now, the experience of the people must start from what they are now in their present culture, their presently accepted meanings and values. Anything imposed on them from above will be received according to their own experienced meanings and values which they have understood, affirmed and practiced and unconditionally loved as their own. If the RP bill has, from the start, meanings and values foreign or contrary to theirs, it will be ineffective, (i.e., will not produce the results desired by the bill, namely, reduce population growth), or worse, it will be like an experiment imposed on the throbbing flesh of the Filipino people, causing a lot of suffering and disruption in their lives as a people. Witness what happened to all the other countries who have allowed the imposition of such a mindset and value system to enter into their laws and cultures.

To have authentic development there is no substitute to self-transcendence (being attentive in experience, intelligent in understanding, reasonable in judgment, responsible in decision and unconditional in love) and sublation (the development from one lower level of living to a higher one will not only not result in any loss of what is good in the lower one but would raise and lift the good in the lower one to the richer level of good of the higher one and so will even need that lower-level good to grow into and become the richer higher-level good).

Thus, if reducing population growth is the end of the RP bill, then it should not impose from above a mindset and value system opposed to the culture of the Filipino people but must start by moving within that culture of the people and go hand in hand with them to develop that culture to more and more attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibleness, and finally, to an unconditionalness in love that can transform their responsibleness, reasonableness, intelligence and attentiveness to an even higher (divine) level.

Fr. Walter L. Ysaac, S.J. is a Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the Loyola School of Theology.

RH Bill -- Ethical Analysis and Objections

Fr. Joaquin Ferrer SVD, Ph.D is a full-time Associate Professor at the Faculty of Business Administration, Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan. He has just published a scholarly paper, 30 pages long, rigorously analyzing House Bill 96, the best-known version of the Reproductive Health Bill before its consolidation. Despite its title ("RH96, Ethical Analysis and Objections: Developing Common Ground for Dialogue), the paper does not deviate from, and in fact strongly supports, the position of the Church on this issue.

Despite the title, this paper also analyzes the flawed aspects of the bill from the demographic, medical, economic and legal perspectives.

Nevertheless, the points raised in this article remain valid even with the advent of the consolidated bill, as can be seen below. 

The initial, pre-publication draft was published on this blog on February 15, 2011: A thorough presentation of the objections to the RH Bill

The following is the final version of this paper, as published in the Nanzan Management Review (March 2011 issue):

Accompanying this article is a detailed comparison of House Bill 96 (on which this critique is based) and the consolidated version of the various Reproductive Bills -- House Bill 4244, thus proving that the critique remains relevant: