The Philippines Under Fire

”The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health And
Population And Development Act Of 2011”—a title which manages the
remarkable feat of encapsulating three lies of the
abortion/population control movement in the short span of a dozen
words.

As I write, there is a battle royal
underway in the Philippine Congress. On the one side are the
Planned Parenthood types, backed by well-funded international
organizations, who are attempting to ram through legislation that
would cripple the Filipino birth rate. On the other side stand
those who believe that the most precious resource of the Philippines
is its people, and who object to the use of what some call “human
pesticides” to control the Filipino population.

As you might suspect, the U.S.
foreign aid establishment, emboldened by the anti-people mentality of
the Obama administration, is on the wrong side of this crucial battle
for Life.

The legislation in question is
called ”The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health And
Population And Development Act Of 2011”—a title which manages the
remarkable feat of encapsulating three lies of the
abortion/population control movement in the short span of a dozen
words.

  • “Responsible Parenthood’ is shorthand
    for the wrongheaded notion that couples are somehow doing the world a
    favor by having few or no children. In fact, the opposite is
    true: Children are the only future a nation has. Those
    who are willing to provide for the future in the most fundamental
    way—by providing the future generation—are a national treasure.
    They should be praised and encouraged, not condemned and sterilized.

  • “Reproductive Health,” another
    favorite of the anti-life movement, is equally misleading. Such
    programs are not intended to produce health
    at all, but sterility. Lest you think I exaggerate, consider
    how the “reproductive health” of a population is defined: It is
    the percentage of women of childbearing age who have been sterilized
    or who are using so-called “modern methods of contraception.” The
    higher this percentage (of women who have been chemically or
    surgically sterilized), the greater the supposed “reproductive
    health” of the population is said to be. This leads to the
    absolutely bizarre conclusion that a population enjoying perfect
    “reproductive health” would not be able to
    reproduce at all!
    Why? Because every
    last female reproductive system would have been disabled. We should
    not be surprised that the same people who define pregnancy as a
    disease, define “reproductive health” as sterility.

  • Finally, the implication of “Population
    and Development” is that population growth constitutes an
    intolerable burden on the economy. But while it is true that
    growing populations do produce temporary scarcities of goods and
    services, in a free market entrepreneurs respond by innovating; they
    devise more efficient means of production, for example, or they find
    substitutes for scarce materials. At the end of the day a
    larger population not only produces more goods and services, they do
    so at a lower price. Economists have a name for this: It’s
    called economies of scale.

The language of the Philippine
Reproductive Health Bill, as it is called for short, is just as
dangerous as its name suggests. Section 20, which fixes the
“ideal” family size at two children, undermines the God-given
right of couples to decide for themselves the number and spacing of
their children. It will give further impetus to social
engineering projects, already underway in the Philippine Department
of Health and other government departments, to reduce family size.
In our experience at PRI, any time a government sets population
targets of any kind, it leads to human rights abuses.

But this is only the beginning of
the mischief. Consider Section 13, which imposes on local
government officials the obligation to enforce the provisions of the
Act and “give priority to family planning work”. To this
China hand, this sounds an awful lot like the PRC, where local
officials are under constant pressure to reduce the birth rate, and
do so by resorting to forced sterilizations, forced contraceptions
and, all too often, forced abortions.

Another provision which could have
been taken from Beijing’s playbook is Section 15, which sets up a
so-called “Mobile Health Care Service,” and details how it will
operate around the country. Apparently, as is the case in
China, mobile sterilization teams will be brought in to do the dirty
work of population control that local physicians, nearly all
Catholic, find morally objectionable.

Incredibly, the proposed law even
attempts to stifle dissent by Catholics and others by prohibiting the
dissemination of “malicious disinformation about the intent and
provisions of this Act.” The “malicious disinformation”
that the framers of the bill had in mind would presumably
include—aside from my criticisms above—pointing out the simple
truth that life begins at conception.

Now I know that you may find this
hard to believe, but the “reproductive health” enthusiasts who
support the bill deny that a woman who has conceived a child is
actually pregnant. It is not until five to seven days after
conception, when the developing embryo implants in the lining of the
uterus, that they are finally willing to admit its existence.

In claiming that human life does
not begin at conception, but at implantation, they violate not only
science but common sense. But it is important to understand
that they are not fools. They do not engage in this obvious
subterfuge lightly, but because they believe that the very success of
their population control agenda demands it.

You see, if they admit that life
truly does begin at conception, then they would also have to admit
that every last one of their hormonal concoctions—from pills and
hormonally laced IUDs to implants and injectables—cause early-term
abortions. All hormonal contraception works, at least part of
the time, by preventing an already conceived baby from implanting in
the uterus.

The backers of the Reproductive
Health Bill lie about this, too, of course, because they know that
few women would take a supposed “contraceptive” knowing that it
would actually cause them to abort.

This second lie is especially
important to their efforts in the Philippines, where the
Constitution, in Article II Section 12, provides that “the State
shall equally protect the life of … the unborn from conception.”
The Philippine Congress, wanting to leave no doubt about its
intentions and no room for misinterpretation, defined the word
conception in medical terms, as the fertilization of the ovum.
Implantation goes unmentioned

This puts the Reproductive Health
Bill, which indiscriminately promotes all types of abortifacient
contraceptive devices and services, on a collision course with the
Philippine Constitution.

The bill’s backers, supported by
foreign “experts” and driven by their anti-people agenda, hotly
deny that contraceptives are human pesticides, and that their massive
distribution in the Philippines will exterminate large numbers of
innocent Filipino babies. But there is little doubt that, if
the bill passes, and “reproductive health” becomes the order of
the day in the archipelago, that millions will die.

So far, the Philippines has
resisted the population control juggernaut that has crushed the
populations of other Asian countries like China and Indonesia.
Zoe Vidal, a Philippine bioethicist, rightly observes that in this
sense the Philippines is “the last country standing.”

Let us pray, for the sake of
generations of Filipino babies as yet unborn, that they shall stand
fast.

Never miss an update!

Get our Weekly Briefing! We send out a well-researched, in-depth article on a variety of topics once a week, to large and growing English-speaking and Spanish-speaking audiences.

Subscribe to our Weekly Briefing!

Receive expert analysis every Tuesday morning.
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.