Wednesday, July 23, 2008 Wenceslao: Values vs. contraceptives By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
I UNDERSTAND why many people are puzzled by the spirited opposition of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines to House Bill 4110 or “An Act Providing for a National Policy on Reproductive Health, Responsible Parenthood and Population Development.” It’s not pro-abortion or pro-death as the Church paints it, some say.
House Bill 4110 is actually but incidental to the long-drawn conflict between two world views loosely referred to as pro-life and pro-choice. This can be illustrated in the battle against AIDS. While both preach clean living as antidote to the scourge, the latter may go so far as to distribute condoms in Kamagayan or teach prostitutes “safe” oral sex.
Indeed, the main objection of the Catholic Church against House Bill 4110 is not that it promotes abortion but that it spreads a culture that allows abortion to flourish. Here, the provisions involving contraception is the main objection. For the Church, “contraceptivism” is anathema to the values it has been preaching for centuries.
Mother Teresa’s take on contraception is illustrative: “In destroying the power of giving life through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self. This turns the attention to self and so it destroys the gift of love in him or her. In loving, the husband and wife must turn the attention to each other as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception.”
The Church feels that by promoting a “full range” of family planning methods, House Bill 4110 weakens the hold on families of such values as love of life. Contraception, as one HB 4110 critic noted, “enables those who are not prepared to care for babies to engage in sexual intercourse; when they become pregnant, they resent the unborn child for intruding upon their lives, and they turn to abortion.
But proponents of HB 4110 also argue that unwanted pregnancies and abortion is precisely what the measure wants to prevent with the use of contraceptives. People “not prepared to care for babies engage in sexual intercourse” so they need to be protected through the use of contraceptives. So which comes first, the egg or the chicken?
When life can be considered life has also been a bone of contention between the pros and the antis. For the Church, abortion can take the form of an intra-uterine device preventing a fertilized egg from being implanted in the uterine wall or pills preventing the implantation of a growing embryo. In this sense, contraceptives are abortifacients.
The most telling argument against the contraceptive lifestyle, however, is the experience in more liberal societies like the United States---liberal in the sense that a wide range of choices is available, from the use of contraceptives to resorting to abortion. More than a million women seek abortion there despite the availability of contraceptives.
Which brings us to the age-old contradiction between idealism and pragmatism. Or more specifically the use of values as against contraceptives in stemming population growth and battling the ill-effects of a liberal lifestyle. If you ask me, I prefer that the dilemma be resolved based on Philippine and not western perspective.
