A student paper's courageous stand versus the RH bill

The recent editorial of DMMAxim, the official Student Publication of DMMA College of Southern Philippines (source):

“The long-term solution”

Despite the condemnation of some religious sectors, the congress has been speeding up the passage of the“Reproductive Health Bill” or otherwise known as the “Responsible Parenthood Bill” as they stand on their objective to provide an immediate solution to the exploding population of our country which is pointed out to be the root cause of poverty.

Part of the content of the bill is the prevention of the widely spread sexually transmitted disease, information on sex and reproduction, unwanted pregnancy, and other reproductive health concerns through the use of modern contraceptive methods.

People might wonder, however, what the real drive of the bills.  As it has been observed, anyone today can freely purchase a condom and other forms of contraception whether in a pharmacy or in a convenience store. In fact, some parents have been using condoms and other forms of contraception in order to space the birth of their children. Also, some of the youth today who engaged in pre-marital sex are already knowledgeable about these. On the other hand, some religious sectors have already recommended an alternative way in controlling population which does not violate the tenets of the church, such as the existing family planning program which uses natural and scientific knowledge and methods.

Taking these into consideration would lead to the question: Is the population of our country really the root cause of poverty?

A huge part of our population belongs to the ranks of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW). In the year 2009, remittances from the OFW sector reached a record of US$ 16.4 Billion which is equivalent to 10 percent of the gross domestic product of our country that year. If these remittances were only used appropriately for the people, it would have been of great help, if not totally address, poverty.

What really happens in the Philippines is a grave unequal distribution of wealth. The rich gets richer, while the poor gets poorer and remain vulnerable, while the powerful politicians have a stranglehold control over the Philippine government. When they should be formulating resolutions to solve the poverty, they keep on grabbing the resources left from our treasury. At the end of the day, they fail to deliver what the people really need.

Indeed, RH bill cannot be placed as an address to our countless problems. The rising poverty rate cannot be blamed on the population, but on the corruption that takes place in the high offices of our government. What our lawmakers have been doing right now is formulating an instant solution to poverty without addressing the root cause of it. If our lawmakers are sincere enough in addressing this problem, then they must instead strengthen our laws on corruption cases to prevent some of our corrupt officials from dipping their dirty fingers into the nation’s coffers. Only by then can genuine change and long-term solutions come into existence.

Inquirer's surprisingly positive editorial on the HSBC report

(For the background to this editorial see this.)

From today's Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial:

.

Because it was released in the run-up to Monday’s Chinese Lunar New Year, the HSBC report, “The World in 2050,” has been met with incredulity, with critics attributing it to the geomancy typical of the season. But the report merely confirms, albeit in bolder terms, the rise of the Pacific Century, which has been heralded close to a generation ago. Most of the forecast largest economies and “star performers,” like the Philippines, Peru and Mexico, are in the Pacific Rim. 

When he was president (1992-1998), Fidel V. Ramos made “Philippines 2000”—that is, the rise of the country as a dragon economy—his centerpiece. He could at least now take comfort in the fact that his vision has been more or less reaffirmed by the HSBC during, propitiously enough, the Year of the Dragon. 

But even if the bank says that Philippine growth would be the most dramatic since it would leapfrog by 27 notches from its current status, Filipinos want more. Why wait for 38 years before the Philippines? 

The answer is that all of the nation’s struggles are part of its learning curve. What the Philippines should do is to embrace the present with all its challenges. To be sure, the report does not consider how the communist and Muslim conflicts, both incidentally some 40 years old now, may dampen Philippine growth. 

Still, the Philippines holds the biggest promise, according to HSBC, because of its robust population growth. In a rare moment of technocratic candor, HSBC virtually declares that high population is an economic plus, rather than a minus. “The losers are the small populations and aging economies of Europe,” the report says. Emerging economies of Eastern Europe would do well in the next decade “before demographics prove to be a drag.” Japan, predicted to slide down further behind China and India, would see its working population shrink by 37 percent because of demographic winter. Russia may have the world’s largest territory and is set to become the 15th biggest economy in 2050. But it would be just a step ahead of pygmy Philippines and its declining population would shrink its GDP by 31 percent. 

The task now is to invest in human resources...

Cebu Daily News comes out swinging versus the RH Bill

A real surprise, given its affiliation with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which tends to support the RH bill.

Editorial

Arguing for life

Cebu Daily News

8:31 am | Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 

Debate on the Reproductive Health bill continues to rage in Congress. 

Rep. Pablo Garcia of Cebu’s 2nd district dropped a bombshell earlier this week, charging that the non-government organization that includes members of the Lower House called the Philippine Legislators Committee on Population and Development receives funds from foreign organizations based in the United States who deliberately want to put the number of Filipinos under control. 

Let us for a moment leave Garcia to spar with staunch RH bill advocate Edcel Lagman and visit related realities on the ground. 

Like that other bombshell, celebrity DJ Mo Twister’s allegation that his ex-girlfriend actress Rhian Ramos, under pressure to stay relevant—read: single—in the domestic entertainment industry, had an abortion, and that he was father of the unborn child. 

Or the fact that an Internet search of key words “Cebu,” “fetus,” “found” and “2011” will return links to a long series of news items about aborted fetuses found in Cebu this year. 

Last Nov. 25, a fetus was found in a vacant lot behind the Cebu International Convention Center in Mandaue City. 

Last Oct. 11, a fetus was almost put through a shredder in the Inayawan Sanitary Landfill in Cebu City. 

Last September, one fetus each was found in barangay Apas and barangay Sambag II, Cebu City. Twin fetuses were found floating in the Butuanon River last August. 

The world celebrates Human Rights Day on December 10. The United Nations states that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” (Article III, Universal Declaration of Human Rights) 

Our country’s Bill of Rights states that the State shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from the moment of conception. 

This makes us wonder why so much energy is being spent on the Reproductive Health bill, several times resurrected in Congress, while nearly nothing has been said about Senate Bill No. 2635 or the Protection of the Unborn Child Act of 2011 that Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr. authored. 

There’s to much fudging among those who say that the Reproductive Health bill will promote the well-being of women. (Any doctor will acknowledge that chemical contraceptives increase a woman’s risk of contracting cancer, intra-uterine devices tear wombs and that condoms don’t remove the risk of the spread of sexually transmitted infections; and there are “contraceptives that actually induce abortions.) 

The Protection of the Unborn Child Act of 2011 is a direct way to stem the rising tide of abortions and consequently reproductively compromised women (which RH bill advocates point to as justifications for passing that bill). 

Come to think of it, we rarely hear or read reports about the arrest of abortionists. Could this be because among the abortionists are doctors and compliant pharmacists who lead women to use abortion-inducing drugs or abortive procedures?

Strengthening the culture of life

Better posted here late than never!

THE RH BILL: LOSING THE SENSE OF THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE

Posted on: February 24, 2011 by BCBP EDITOR

The Reproductive Health Bill now in Congress has been the subject of discussions, heated arguments and lengthy position papers for many months. As BCBP members and concerned citizens, we must make it a point to know more about this piece of proposed legislation and how it would affect our lives, our faith, our families, our children and their future.

This Bill is, in the view of our faith, is a prime example of the “conspiracy against life” that is subtly encroaching on the sanctity of life in today’s milieu. This conspiracy takes the form of a “culture of death” and damages us not only in our personal, family, and community relations, but also distorts relations between peoples and nations. It is in direct opposition to the Culture of Life.

For a more detailed discussion of the various aspects of the Culture of Life, the Culture of Death, and other burning issues of the times (contraception, abortion, euthanasia, bioethics, health care, and sexuality concerns), read Evangelizing Presence: Caring for Life, a BCBP publication, authored by Nancy Russell Catan (BCBP Portal Editor), Fr. Pasquale T. Giordano, SJ, and Mitos Rivera. It is available at the BCBP National Office. Some of the salient features of the Culture of Death vs the Culture of Life are summarized in the following paragraphs.

The basic feature of this Culture of Death is the noticeable absence of God in a growing secular lifestyle, influenced by a flood of distorted and hedonistic values where pleasure is maximized and pain is minimized. Having and hoarding become more important than “being”. Sexuality is depersonalized and exploited. The so-called right of women to decide whether or not to kill their unborn child due to various reasons usually in support of their personal life-style is highlighted and the right of the unborn to its God-given life is being ignored.

This is the modern tragedy: the eclipse of the sense of God and man, and the resulting distortions wherein society refuses to accept and care for any life – the sick, the aged, the dysfunctional, the weak – that interferes with its “progress”. We are gradually but inexorably losing the sense of the sacred in our society.

Life as designed by God is always “a good”. It is the seed of an existence that transcends the very limits of time, for God himself has planted eternity in the human heart. Human life has always been sacred to God, and to proclaim Christianity is to proclaim life.

Therefore as a “people for life” we need to view life in its deeper meaning, and to look for God’s living image in every person, in the unborn person as well as in the birthed. By seeing Christ in every person we meet, we can experience a God-given, everyday – or we could say, an every-person – epiphany! This is the Culture of Life.

It is this Culture of Life that promotes and enables us and others to live in dignity and fullness of life. It is in embracing the Culture of Life that helps us build our families as the basic life unit of community and society. It is in strengthening this Culture of Life in our families that the integrity and sanctity of the family as the domestic church, the basic unit of Christian life and cornerstone of society, is truly realized.

Let us ask ourselves and answer sincerely and honestly from our hearts: Who am I, who are we, to arrogate ourselves equal to God by legislating whether a God-created, God-given life should live or die? The future of our society depends on the rediscovery of the innate human and moral values that promote and strengthen the Culture of Life. At the same time we need to fight against those values that promote the influence of the Culture of Death.

The New RH Bill: Same Old Same Old....

New RH bill: Deadly, anti-constitution
(An Excerpt from the UST Varsitarian Editorial for March 15, 2011)

PRESIDENT Aquino III should be commended for dropping the reproductive health (RH) bill from his legislative agenda. But his minions in the House of Representatives just the same are prioritizing the passage of the bill. They have in fact consolidated several versions of the bill and rammed it through the process so that, despite the denial of House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte that they were rushing the bill, it’s now on its second reading and up for plenary debates. What the right hand giveth, the left taketh.

The consolidated version incorporates the President’s version of family planning, “responsible parenthood,” and further pushing the envelope, now uses the word “population,” making Edcel Lagman and his battened likes eat their word since they had been claiming before that heir original version of the bill was not a population-control measure. Considering that just about every shade and nuance of the population-control movement has been incorporated into the consolidated version, the bill is now known as “The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health and Population and Development Act of 2011.”

With 35 sections and more than 5,800 words, the bill promises to become the most extensive measure by any Congress in history, and should leave no doubt to anyone about its Stalinist conceit and social-engineering intentions. Just about every possibility of unwanted pregnancy and regeneration by the poor is checked by the bill. While ostensibly declaring it does not set “demographic and population targets,” it declares that the ideal family size is two, which is just about saying that the population growth target should be zero. (The ideal population growth for the Philippines is zero, according to RH backer and former health secretary Alberto Romualdez!) The bill adds that the state “shall assist couples” to achieve that size.

Those who say that there’s nothing wrong with this should be reminded that the state is not exactly wet behind the ears: it is after all the state and its bureaucracy that have fostered the corruption and waste that characterize the debacle that is the Filipino republic. Considering the sorry tale of the tape as far as the Philippine state is concerned, should the state, which has an overpopulation of bureaucrats battening themselves like Lagman and congressmen on people’s money, have the right to suggest, much less, declare that there’s such a thing as an “ideal” number of children for couples to have?

Much more, should the state have any right to add what follows after the bill’s arrogant discourtesy of declaring how many children Filipino couples should have: “Attaining the ideal family size is neither mandatory nor compulsory. No punitive action shall be imposed on parents having more than two children.” One should rightly cringe at that.

“Assisting” couples to attain the ideal family size wouldn’t be hard for the state since the bill sanctions just about any contraceptive means and, making free use of taxpayer’s money and funding from foreign donors that support abortion, makes them available to all. Those who argue that the bill is pro-choice but not necessarily pro-abortion should look at the bill’s liberal sanction of contraceptives, some of which even physicians admit are technically abortifacient. And they should look at sections 2 and 3 on “Declaration of Policy” and “Guiding Principles.” While the bill enshrines “reproductive health” as a “universal basic human right” and exalts “freedom of choice” – where do you find such in the Philippine Constitution? – it doesn’t mention key state policies in the charter that should be the guiding principles of any law relating to family, life, demographics, and sex education for the young, the most important of which is:

“Section 12. The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government.”

Why the very telling bypass of such a very relevant constitutional policy in a bill that seeks to use hundreds of millions of pesos to shower contraceptives and abortifacients on the poor; to provide sex education to the young and teach them how to have “safe sex,” even if the education ministries, the biggest bureaucracies, can hardly teach school kids properly the three R’s; and generally to neuter the poor by mass ligation and vasectomy?

Amid the mass of words and declarations and provisions and platitudes of the consolidated RH bill, try to search for constitutional principles such as “the sanctity of family life,” “(protection of) the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception,” “promotion of social justice,” and “dignity of every person.”

So sorry, but you search in vain.

Ona, Akbayan, Jalin

Department of Health Secretary Enrique Ona, should also be praised for sticking to his job as health agent of the state and shunning outlandish stunts like the ones staged by his hopeless predecessor Esperanza Cabral, who distributed condoms at Dangwa Flower Market last year during Valentine’s Day.

Eager to strike back at the bishops who had been holding back the passage of the RH bill, Cabral found a bogeyman last year out of the increase in HIV cases to press for safe sex. Insisting that she was within her jurisdiction as a state health official, she distributed condoms near UST on Valentine’s Day. In doing so, she merely showed the arrogance of the state because Valentine’s is a Catholic feast. Apparently, she had thought February 14 was Motel Day.

Those who cry separation of church and state whenever the bishops and the clergy criticize the RH bill should learn from Cabral’s case. The constitutional provision is really a re-expression of the republican dictum, “non-establishment of religion”; thus, separation of church and state is really a prohibition against the state, not against the church. Cabral’s case shows that it is often the state that transgresses on the church. And whatever the alleged meddling of the church on state affairs is, it’s merely one that is suasive, unlike that by the state which, because of its police and taxing powers, is coercive. For example, where did the condoms that Cabral distributed in Dangwa come from? Didn’t they come from the money of ordinary people who were taxed by the state into supporting such an unsavoury stunt as condom distribution during a religious feast which is supposed to enshrine human love, not animal lust?

Meanwhile, the blasphemous stunt of Cabral last year was restaged on Valentine’s this year by the Akbayan party-list group at the Nepa Q Mart in Quezon City. Its youth arm, Akbayan Youth, is the same group that criticized UST Theology professor Aguedo Florence Jalin for giving incentives to students who would post criticisms on the Akbayan stunt and the RH bill on Akbayan’s Facebook fan page.

It is quite galling that a group that by and large receives international funding, some of them from groups that espouse “reproductive rights,” should take to task a Catholic educator who gives incentives to students doing a completely optional assignment to defend the pro-life stance of the Church against RH and safe-sex proponents. Considering too that the professor did not force his students to do the posting, even making it clear to those who support RH among his classes that they need not join the opposition to the measure, considering further that hardly anyone fails Theology (except those always absent) in UST, Akbayan doth protest too much. Hasn’t Akbayan heard of “academic freedom” and “intellectual honesty”? Jalin was teaching Social Issues of the Church and he had the perfect right, nay the responsibility, to tackle the RH bill and the threat it poses to things which the Church holds dear—the natural law, the dignity of the human person, and the sanctity of life. By urging his students to post their criticisms of RH and of Akbayan’s attack on religion through its distribution of condoms on Valentine’s, a religious feast, Jalin was merely asking them to stand up for what they believe in. To put their money where their mouth is. Which cannot be said of other educators, such as the Ateneo 14, who oppose Catholic teachings on birth control and flaunt their defiance despite teaching in Catholic schools: they put their money where their pocket is while completely chucking intellectual honesty.

Akbayan should be reminded that it is part of the administration coalition and technically, a part of government. Since it has representation in parliament and its people occupy key posts in the administration, it has no choice but to consider criticisms and opposing views. No one in power has the right to be onion-skinned.

The UST Varsitarian's Response to the Ateneo Professors supporting the RH Bill

Dishonest, mediocre, anti-poor

BY ISSUING a statement supporting the population-control bill, Reproductive Health (RH) Bill 5043, the 14 faculty members of the other Catholic university—Ateneo de Manila– betray the canker that may eat into any Catholic institution that, while inherently holy, has tendencies toward evil. Star Wars calls it the Dark Side, St. Thomas Aquinas calls it concupiscence. We simply call it intellectual dishonesty.

Since they teach in a Catholic institution, the 14 should either have the readiness to defend the Catholic position or at least have the sensitivity to refrain from doing something that would divide the Church. But not only do these self-proclaimed Catholic educators break away from the Catholic position and urge Catholics to do so: they twist Catholic teachings to suit their self-serving position.


Their distortions of the Catholic teachings on freedom of conscience and the centrality of the human person are shocking. If these teachers indeed have conscience, as they claim to be practicing in disagreeing with the bishops, it will be what the catechism calls as erroneous conscience. And what centrality of the human person are they talking about when RH bill 5043 seeks to make available contraceptives and abortifacients and pave the way for legalizing abortion by the use of millions of pesos that could otherwise go to direct provisions for maternal health and poverty? Population-control measures like RH bill 5043 look at the poor not as persons but as rabbits whose propagation must be checked. How could the poor have freedom of choice and conscience when the state, backed by hundreds of millions of pesos, compels them to take contraceptives and limit their children to two per couple? Were the Filipino poor neutered by the Marcos dictatorship and the Chinese families forced into complying with the one-child rule by the communists allowed freedoms of information, choice and conscience?


Even more shocking is the academic mediocrity of the professors. Their support for the population-control bill is backed by the intellectual school of doomsday social science, whose methods and claims have been questioned by more cautious, less panic-prone, and more socially responsible schools. A cursory review of the endnotes of their statement would reveal that their review of literature is narrow and shallow. It is as if social science had stopped with Malthus and Ehrlich.


They claim, for instance, that “a close association exists between our country’s chronic poverty and rapid population growth… [thus] curbing out population growth rate is a requisite of sound economic policy and effective poverty reduction strategy,” and that the bill aims to control population growth to arrive at a so-called “healthy” economy.


Their statement should at least belie Rep. Edsel Lagman’s claim that RH bill 5043 is a “healthcare” bill; it is not, it’s a population-control measure that harks back to the days of the dictator Marcos who enshrined family planning in the 1973 Constitution and made it a centerpiece of his “constitutional authoritarianism.”


But going back to the claim of the 14 doomsday pundits that there’s correlation between “chronic poverty” and population growth, it’s astonishing that a claim should be made when most recent literature have shown there’s none. Despite being in the academe, they have missed – or intentionally excluded? – important and authoritative studies on population and poverty that deny any link between the two.


The New York Times, Asiaweek, Far Eastern Economic Review, and Economist have declared overpopulation as among of the greatest hoaxes of the last century. Nobel-winning economists themselves such as Simon Kuznets have denied any negative correlation between population and economic growth. Meanwhile, Amartya Sen and Gary Becker have recommended that funds for birth control would be better used in directly addressing poverty.


Anti-health


But after repeating the tired litany of doomsday population economics, the 14 Horsemen of the Apocalypse just as casually turn to the alleged health benefits of a birth-control program for women, even if not a single one of them has a medical degree or any diploma remotely connected to the health sciences.
But the doctors, nurses and health professionals of UST, Human Life International-Asia, and Pro-Life Philippines know better. Pre- and post-natal care for women has nothing to do with contraceptives and abortion. Medical science can deal with pregnancy complications. If there’s high maternal and infant mortality, it is not because of unwanted pregnancy or pregnancy complications: it is because of the lack of health services. In the same manner, while many Filipinos die of TB and dengue, the public health budgets for combating these diseases are low compared to the tens of millions used for birth control, which basically looks at babies as diseases that need to be checked, contracepted, aborted.


Moreover, it does not follow that readily available contraceptives can improve the health of the people. Health experts say that pills, injectables, abortion suction, menstrual regulation machines, ligation, and vasectomy are in fact risky and could result in injuries, sickness, and even death.


It must be emphasized that “reproductive health” is not maternal health, which is the more embracing, the more medically correct concept to represent the holistic health care of women. RH bill 5043 is not a maternal health measure but a contraceptive measure: it looks at every pregnancy as “unwanted”; it looks at pregnancy as the cause and a compounding of poverty; it tries to check the fertility of women not because of any consideration for women’s health but for purposes of social engineering!


Anti-youth


Nor is the bill “pro-youth” for providing sex education to young people, as the 14 Wolf-criers claim. It would merely increase the chances of the youth engaging in the risky and reckless behavior that safe sex engenders.


Admittedly, information is the right of everyone. But could we expect quality and correct information and instruction from a government whose public education system are a shambles and whose health services are a disaster—and information and instruction for young people during their formative years? Moreover, since the paradigm and ideology of the bill itself are suspect, the course content of any instruction it seeks to provide is also suspect.


Leave sex education to the parents. They may not do a good job at it, but that’s all right since the state can’t seem to get anything right at all!


Pro-abortion, anti-life


Ah, but RH bill 5043 insists it promotes contraception to stop abortion. This is a bald-faced lie when one considers that most of the backers and their funders are pro-choice (read: pro-abortion). One of the signatories of the statement, Mary Racelis, claims in one article that “educated Catholics” should support the bill because it would curb abortions. She cites the “473,000” induced abortions allegedly performed in 2000 without even questioning the veracity of the figure. Worse, she cites the World Health Organization estimate that the abortions could have been double that figure—800,000 abortions!--without questioning how the UN body could have made such an extrapolation.


Any social scientist worth his salt or any Filipino with a modicum of education would easily make educated questions about such figures, considering that previous demographic estimates made in the name of birth control and safe sex have been widely off the mark, such as Thomas Malthus’s doomsday scenario in the 19th century of an overpopulated earth in the next century (“a libel inflicted on the human race,” said Karl Marx); Paul Ehrlich’s similar scenario in 1980 at the turn of the 21st century (he lost the wager with Julian Simon 10 years later, remember?); the projection by UN agencies and Philippine public health authorities in the early 1990’s that the Philippines would have some 10,000 HIV-Aids cases in 10 years because of low condom use (the country has only 3,000 now); the claim of gays they easily comprise 10% of the population (a projection exposed as limp); and the fantastic claim of the UN Fund for Population Assistance and the 1994 Cairo Conference that the “costed population package” to implement so-called reproductive health care services in developing countries by 2015 would total $77.7 billion with domestic contributions from the poor countries themselves who are supposedly beneficiaries of such services funding two-thirds of the cost!


Racelis and her fellow Ateneo divination experts should ask whether or not the same alarmist situation conjured by the UNFPA and Cairo is being used by the WHO, UNFPA and backers (or true authors?) of the Lagman bill to justify the initial tab to implement the RH bill—some P1.2 billion!


Jesuitical


The 14 themselves belong to an institution that has no apprehensions in getting funding from organizations that promote abortion. Together with the Packard Foundation, which promotes “safe and legal abortion” in other countries, Ateneo has put up the Health Unit—Ateneo Graduate School of Business in Leadership Innovations in Population Management. One wonders how Ateneo’s partnership with an abortion foundation dovetails with its setting up a medical school where students are supposed to make the Hippocratic Oath and uphold Catholic bioethics.


And the Ateneo Institute of Church and Social Studies has published a monograph with articles by social scientists from Ateneo and birth-control demographers from UP and other secular institutes (whose studies are cited by the Ateneo 14) that basically back the Lagman bill. The publication and the discussions were funded by a pro-choice organization.


In all of these cozy and cash-rich sleeping-with-the-enemy arrangements, Ateneo’s jesuitic nature seems to be showing indeed.


Anti-development


In any case, by equating women’s health with birth control, the 14 Grim Reapers betray their enslavement to the population ideology of the UN and its agencies and the population-control industry. They betray at least their academic mediocrity—perhaps ingrained by their arrogance—for not considering very relevant and trenchant studies that question the blurring between development and population funding.


The Ateneo professors should at least stop calling themselves “Catholic educators” or “educated Catholics.” For a truly educated Catholic view on population control, here’s the view of Cecilia Hadley and Maria Sophia Aguirre of the Department of Business and Economics of the Catholic University of America as published in the International Journal of Social Economics (2005 Vol. 32, Issue 9):


“During the last decade increasingly large amounts of money have been spent on limiting population growth of underdeveloped countries. Population control is seen as the corner-stone of development and population activities. Thus, population control has become ‘population assistance,’ and birth control has become ‘reproductive health services.’ Population control is pursued at the expense of women’s rights and to the detriment of real economic growth and social improvement.”


Moreover:


“Rather than helping countries and peoples, the continual focus on population assistance has left them desperate for other forms of aid. This focus has actually infringed upon human rights especially upon many women who do not understand the contraceptives they are being given. The large amounts of funds that developing countries are now exhorted to provide for support population measures drain resources better spent elsewhere on such things as reducing malaria and educating women. In short, ‘population assistance’ has usurped a great deal of the energy and funds of the international community without even empirical justification for such an approach to development issues and has resulted in a neglect for other areas of real need.”


We enjoin Thomasians, Ateneans, and all Catholics to be truly themselves—discerning and critical of issues, always seeking the light amid the darkness foisted on them by shadowy figures that include those who call themselves Catholics, educated, and educators. Let us all fight the grand deception of the population-control complex and reject RH bill 5043.


Editorial. Vol. LXXX, No. 5 • November 20, 2008


Illustration by Matthew Niel J. Hebrona