Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Carvajal: Compassion vs. purity of doctrine By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
SUN.STAR reported the other day about the dwindling support for reproductive health bills pending in Congress. Rep. Nerissa Soon-Ruiz thinks legislators are succumbing to pressure coming from a very influential sector without identifying it.
It is no secret, however, in population control circles that the most influential lobby against such a law is from the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) and religious organizations under their vise-grip control like the Catholic Women’s League and the Knights of Columbus.
The CBCP has held hostage all devout Catholic presidents (like Cory and Gloria) in this country by threatening withdrawal of support if a population control bill is passed. That is why we made the most progress in our population control program with president Fidel Ramos, a protestant and, not surprisingly, with president Joseph Estrada, a not-so-devout Catholic.
Hostage-taking, however, is a two-way street and presidents have always kept the bishops in line by dangling the reproductive health bill above their necks like a sword of Damocles. Cory knows this so she should not be praying for bishops to change their stand against Gloria. They would not, they cannot afford to imperil, among of course other comforts, their pet program (non-program really) of natural family planning.
If bishops thought with their hearts and not with their dogmatic minds they would see that reproductive health laws provide poor people with needed resources from government to effectively plan the size of their families. These laws would prevent unplanned pregnancies that, according to official statistics, terminate in abortion. Yes, it is a fact that most abortions happen after the fourth or fifth child of a poor married woman.
To go against reproductive health legislation is to be anti-poor. The bishops might not want to admit it but rich and upper middle class mothers are disobeying them and practicing artificial birth control because they can afford it while the poor cannot without government help. I certainly hope the bishops do not think naively that the middle class and the rich have smaller families because they control their libido better than the poor.
The issue to me is not purity of doctrine but of compassion. The bishops are defending a Church teaching, which in this case is not a dogma of faith, at the expense of compassion. Besides that, what right do the bishops have to deprive the 20 percent non-Catholics among us with the compassion of such a reproductive health law?
I admire Soon-Ruiz for pushing the reproductive health bill. I know she already operates a center for battered women, and that’s compassion in action. More power to the compassionate for they are truly pro-life.
