Tuesday, August 28, 2007 Editorials: Reproductive health debate 2
ONLY a few months after the elections and the new Congress is getting interesting.
In the Senate, there’s the “Hello Garci” probe part 2 and in the House there’s the reproductive health debate, aside from the quarrel on publication of lawmakers’ absences.
The reproductive health debate is also a sequel, as proponents of the reproductive health bills, Reps. Edcel Lagman of Albay and Janette Garin of Iloilo, were reelected.
This is the reason Catholic Church officials, who are very vocal against the bills for supposedly being anti-family and anti-life, are again jittery and bracing for war.
Surely, Lagman, Garin and the so-called pro-choice groups will also be more aggressive and better prepared after failing to pass the bills in the previous House.
Partisanship
The problem with issues like reproductive health is that debates often degenerate into name-calling and protagonists so become partisans the public is lost in the passing.
But for the filing of the reproductive health bills in the House and the Senate to acquire some meaning, the verbal exchange should enlighten instead of confuse people.
Proponents of the bills represent a kind of thinking sweeping other countries and cultures, while opponents are holding on to traditional Filipino values and practices.
Divergent viewpoints, however, have their own good and bad points; not one of them can say their arguments contain absolute truth or are the only correct ones.
Dialogue
In this sense, dialogue and not debate or verbal exchange should be the mode used by the pros and the antis in discussing the logic and ramifications of reproductive health.
More so because the two sides claim to be for the common good.
Indeed, the pros and the antis both start off with their professed love for human life and yet it is amazing how heated the verbal exchange on the issue has become.
The key there is openness to contrary views and readiness to compromise, something that the protagonists claim to agree with and yet do not seem to practice.
Our penchant to ape the west should not extend to transplanting here the kind of divide that now separates the so-called pro-choice and pro-life groups there.
