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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Carvajal: Holy innocents as political victims
By Orlando P. Carvajal
King Herod was told that Jesus, son of David and heir to the throne, had just been born. Since he could not identify the threat to his throne, he had every newborn killed. It was swift and brutal, soldiers knocking on doors and putting to the sword all newborn babies.
Today, babies continue to die as victims of politics. It is not done quite as blatantly as Herod did it but it is no less brutal.
For instance, in the Philippines there are official statistics showing that one of five pregnancies is aborted. The same statistics point out that it is not unmarried teenage girls who get an abortion but mothers 35 years or older.
Which means that the baby is probably the fifth, sixth or seventh in the union, unwanted already because of the parents’ extreme poverty.
Some more babies die days after birth for lack of proper nutrition; again the parents are too poor to properly feed the baby.
Many other babies die of infection and other infant diseases because government health centers lack medicines and buying them from commercial drug stores is simply out of the question considering the poverty of the parents.
So who is killing our babies? We all have our share of guilt but politicians and government bureaucrats take first place when they not only do not appropriate enough for family health but also steal from the meager health budget. One only has to go to a government health facility to realize this.
Our babies will not survive occasional charities during Christmas or during medical missions. Our babies will survive if the parents are given a chance through structural changes in our sharing of the country’s resources to help themselves. Today’s Herod, today’s killer of babies, is poverty, caused by unjust, inequitable economic structures that are perpetuated by an elitist worldview and by a pervasive, system-induced incompetence and corruption.
The elite cannot continue thanking God that they are not part of the great unwashed. Poverty is not from God. Poverty is from greed that is closed to more equitable systems of sharing in the country’s wealth.
We can, therefore, stop killing our babies because we can come up with structures that provide more adequately for people’s needs including health.
Moreover, the poor are quite capable of taking care of themselves if given a chance through radical structural reforms in our health and other delivery systems.
We can, therefore, take care of our babies if we played less politics, on the altar of which so many holy innocents continue to be sacrificed today.
(December 28, 2005 issue)
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