Friday, August 29, 2008 Stop maligning authors of health bill, CBCP told
AN economic professor of the University of the Philippines (UP-Diliman) has urged the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to stop maligning the authors of the Reproductive Health Bill just to convince the public to oppose it.
In a forum at UP Visayas Cebu College yesterday, Dr. Ernesto Pernia said that the bill is one of the answers to overpopulation problem and food crisis.
Pernia has also urged UP students, parents and teachers as well as the Cebuano public to support the bill and they should not be afraid of the opinion of the religious leaders about the matter.
The professor said he is not afraid even if church leaders will excommunicate him as long as it is based on his principle.
Pernia said that if they go by the surveys of Pulse Asia and Social Weather Station (SWS), they could say that the Reproductive Health Bill is supported by majority of the Filipinos.
“The Pulse Asia and SWS surveys tell you that the majority, about 90 percent or more of adult Filipinos think that the government should provide a good family planning program for the country. That is because majority of the Filipinos believe that the rapid population growth is an impediment to economic development, poverty reduction and the improvement of living standard,” he said.
He said nobody could say that these surveys are bias because the people behind the surveys are “respected academic” and the people know them.
Hard church, soft state
According to Pernia, majority of the Filipinos, including the poor, are caught between a hard church and a soft state.
“The hard church is what is what I referred to as the conservative Catholic Church hierarchy. The Bill has been labeled as pro-abortion, anti-life and immoral by the Catholic Church hierarchy and other conservative religious groups who called themselves pro-life. That is unfair because the bill actually, explicitly and categorically state that it is against abortion and it maintains that abortion has to be penalized under our legal system,” he said.
He added that in population economics, they talk about negative externalities, which are disadvantages that are being created by individuals that they cannot internalize, and therefore, they shift the cost to society.
“So, these are unintended social cost of target action. That’s negative externalities,” Pernia said.
He said rapid population growth is the result of decisions by individuals.
“And if you combine these individual decisions they result in rapid population growth, which will also result as constraint to investment in physical and human capital.
When you have a large, young and poor population, the government has to spend a lot on public social services. We have the problem of accommodating so many young people into the school system,” Pernia added. (EOB)
