The Socio-Economic Sophisms of RH bill 5043
(An
Insidious Endangerment of Human Rights)
By Tony
F. Roxas
Words are not just
tools of ordinary day-to-day communication—they can be powerful weapons of
persuasion, especially when packaged neatly and alluringly in well camouflaged
sophisms.
This article aims to
pinpoint, expose and refute some of those concealed underlying sophisms in the
controversial RH Bill 5043.
In doing so, much
hope rests on the likelihood that the majority of RH Bill supporters, both in
and out of Congress, are only honestly mistaken about the wisdom and necessity
of the bill. It is for them and for those who oppose this bill that this paper
is primarily intended. As for the minority of RH Bill supporters who persist in
their untenable position, it is hoped that there may be some window left for
the light of objective truth to enter.
Among the three
pillars on which the RH and Sex Education Bills in the Philippines are anchored
are the following:
RH education is a
human right;
RH education is one
way to help alleviate poverty;
RH education gives
women the right to exercise their
Freedom of Informed
Choice, an important human right.
RH Education
Actually Violates Human Rights
Setting the stage
for the legalization of abortion, or in conjunction with it, as can be inferred
from Sec. Hillary Clinton’s recent statement to the US Congress on the Obama administration’s
interpretation of the term “Reproductive Health”—that it includes “Women’s
Reproductive Rights to “SAFE” Abortion—Reproductive Health Education is being forced into
the educational curricula of developing countries, with the usual “human
rights” shield being cited as grounds for its necessity and urgency.
But just how
logically valid really is this RH Education claim of being a human right?
Foreign and local proponents of this bill overlook, fail or refuse to see and
acknowledge the inherent
relationships of different human rights to one another. In so doing, all sorts
of highly destructive social consequences follow.
It is an axiomatic
truth that human rights exist only because human life exists! If human
life did not exist, there would be no human rights, not even a single right to
assert, protect, speak or even think of.
Obviously, if all
the human rights were gathered and arranged in their order of importance, the right
to life would be the highest of all because, as already said, it is the
reality of human life that makes all other rights exist. For this
reason, the right to life is the principal and all-encompassing right.
All other lesser
rights exist only for the exclusive purpose of supporting the right to life,
enriching it, and protecting and strengthening it. Hence, we have man’s basic
right to food security
because it supports life, his right to education because it enriches his
rational life with knowledge and basic skills needed for total human
development, and his right to the laws of the land that protect and strengthen
the right to life.
Furthermore, any
so-called “rights” that do the very opposite—weakening and not supporting
the right to life, corrupting and poisoning the tender minds of children with
a contraceptive
culture and not enriching their rational life, and endangering or
destroying the right to life and not protecting and strengthening it—are
rights only in name but not in reality. Such “rights” do not have
any moral existence!
Therefore, any and
all provisions of Reproductive Health Bill 5043 and all similar provisions
found in all bills on sex education and all other related bills containing such
nonexistent rights, because they are naturally unjust per se, are absolutely
null and void ab initio and can never be enacted validly into any just law!
The Essential and
Universal Cause of Poverty
Foreign interests
who insist and strive hard to aggressively control our population growth most
often claim that an increase in family size is a cause of poverty. Now, if it
is true that a family becomes poor or poorer precisely because of an
increase in family size, then it would follow that all families that increase
in family size will always end up poor or poorer in the end. But this is
clearly not the case because while it is true that some families end up poor or
poorer, there are also some that end up even richer in the end, while there are
also some that end up about the same as when they began. Therefore, it is not
true that an increase in family size is per se a cause of poverty.
In fact, no less
than two Nobel Laureates in Economics, Gary Backer and Simon Kuznets, and
Resource Economist Julian Simon say the same thing. They emphasize that there
is no scientific evidence proving that an increase in family size is a
cause of poverty.
What then is the
real cause of poverty? The essential, immediate, direct and universal cause of
poverty is nonproductivity or insufficient productivity!
Consequently, if any
foreign or local interests are sincere in wanting to help solve our poverty
problems, they can best do so by helping provide skills, training, education
and livelihood projects which will surely uplift the economic conditions of
the poor, and not insist on flooding poor families with pills and condoms which only result in the end in damage to the mother’s
health and/or the slaying of the unborn. To paraphrase what one writer once
wisely said, productivity,not pills, condoms or abortions, will end poverty!
RH Bill
5043 Denies Women the Right to Freedom of Choice
Let’s
face it. “Freedom of Choice” is a catch phrase these days that is frequently
invoked to rationalize even the most rapacious, unnatural and indefensible
agendas.
The
economic pundits clearly responsible for the global financial meltdown that’s
adversely affecting countries around the world and millions and millions of
people claim
that
they were only exercising their “freedom of choice” to engage in business.
Also,
all the billions of inhabitants of this planet for the past 100 years or so
exercised their freedom of choice to use petroleum-based products as their main
source of
energy
and fuel. Did our freedom of choice make right the now almost irreversible
damage we have inflicted on our ecology? Obviously not!
Clearly,
there is more to the freedom of choice than just exercising it. One must
exercise this right responsibly. And this can be attained only if
the meaning of freedom is clearly understood by the one suggesting and by the
one exercising it.
Freedom
has a twofold meaning, one negative and the other positive. The negative
meaning of freedom is the absence of restraint. One is not free
to swim, for instance, if
his
hands and feet are tied or bound. To be free to swim, his hands and feet should
be untied. Or, he must have the absence of restraint on him,
i.e., he must have negative freedom.
However,
even if his hands and feet are not tied, if he does not know how to swim, he
still is not free to swim. To be truly free, he must have the skill or know-how
of swimming. In short, he must have positive freedom, the presence of a
skill or ability to do something. Only then can one be truly free to swim.
True freedom, therefore, means having both positive freedom and negative
freedom.
In
regard to the exercise of the freedom of choice, before one insists on freedom
from restraint to exercise this right of negative freedom, one must recognize
that there is a prior right and duty to learn how to choose correctly
(positive freedom). Otherwise, freedom will be misused, as
white collar criminals of Wall Street have destroyed our world economy and
petro-chemical firms and the billions of inhabitants of this planet who
believed them have destroyed our ecology.
RH Bill
5043 Promotes an Irresponsible Exercise of the Freedom of Choice: Negative
Freedom without Positive Freedom
Since
the right to safety and the preservation of good health is an essential natural
and fundamental human right second only to the right to life, no man-made
laws or institutions can legitimately nullify, suspend, replace or violate it
any more than can all the nations of the world pass laws that will eliminate or
repeal the law of gravity!
Hence, a
woman who wants to space childbirths is entitled by natural right to
methods of child spacing that are guaranteed absolutely safe, not just
“advertised” as safe by supposed medical experts in the service of pharmaceutical
firms.
But since only natural family planning methods are guaranteed for their
safety, then only such methods may be offered and taught to them, whether by
the government, foreign funded institutions, or private individuals and groups.
The Billings Ovulation Method with its proven 99.98% success rate even for
irregular fertility cycles is one such method.
In promoting the use
of artificial contraceptives, RH Bill 5043 fails or refuses to divulge to
possible users the dangers to life and health such contraceptives bring!
Fortunately, of the
abounding scientific evidence showing the dangers to life and health through
the use of contraceptives, no less than Johns Hopkins University School of
Hygiene and Public Health, the highest medical authority promoting the
population control program worldwide, asserts this:
It is, therefore,
concluded that risk of adenomatous carcinomas of the cervix is increased in
women who use oral contraceptives, that this risk is greatest in long-term
users and users of
high progestin potency products, and that the enhanced risk diminishes with the
passage of time after cessation of use”. (David B. Thomas, Roberts M. Ray, and
the World Health Organization Study of Neoplasia and Steroid Contraceptives;
Oral Contraceptives and Invasive Adenocarcinomas and Adenosquamous Carcinomas
of the Uterine Cervix, American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 144, No. 3, page
288, Copyright 1996 by the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and
Public Health)
And yet the RH bill,
with the support of its foreign sponsors and local counterparts, insists on
letting our female population of reproductive age use these dangerous and
unsafe birth control
methods, defying comprehension and scuttling all sense of humaneness.
In conclusion, RH
Bill 5043 denies Filipino women the right to exercise authentic freedom
of choice because it only wants them to exercise negative freedom, the absence
of restraint, without the corresponding positive freedom, the ability to choose
correctly, because the truth about the dangers these contraceptives bring to
the life and health of possible users is hidden from them.
In short, this RH
Bill wants our Filipino women to exercise the “freedom” of misinformed
choice!
Flawed, invalid and irrelevant
In the light of the
foregoing arguments, all three grounds for the so-called necessity and urgency
of the RH bill have been shown to be flawed, invalid and irrelevant to its
intended conclusion. The only inescapable course of action left then is to
reject and disapprove this controversial bill because the grounds it cites in
no way justify its existence.
And to put things
finally in the right perspective, the pro-life cause is not a unique or
exclusive concern of the Roman Catholic Faith. It is a cause deeply rooted in
natural law, and is, therefore, the concern of all men of goodwill who uphold,
protect and defend the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human
person, whether believers or not in the existence of God or in the afterlife.
It is the same natural moral law whose binding effect on the conscience of
mankind was invoked and strongly enforced in the historic trials of Nazi war
criminals at Nuremberg after World War II for the mass extermination of Jews,
all crimes against humanity. And it is the same natural law that is the
moral bedrock upon which the United Nations organization was founded. Hence its
universal and pervasive binding effect on the conscience of mankind as it is
the ultimate source of natural moral rights, now called human rights, and the
guarantor and protector of the Right to Life.
(Originally published in IMPACT Asian Magazine for Human
Transformation vol 43 no 9 (September 2009)
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