RH law: Thoughts for Palm Sunday

Last Wednesday’s ruling by the Supreme Court that the Reproductive Health (RH) law is “not unconstitutional” carried a unanimity that adds extra weight to the claims of victory from both sides.

For us who oppose that law, we can be grateful that the High Court struck down all those provisions that would coerce everyone into compliance regardless of their religious beliefs or moral convictions. Church-owned hospitals, health workers, public officials, even indigent women needing PhilHealth accreditation, will no longer be required to obey a law that their conscience cannot accept. 

Even parental and marital statuses have been upheld. Neither minors who had miscarriages, nor married individuals, will now be able to avail of RH procedures without the consent of parents or spouse, respectively. This is how coercive the original intentions of the law’s sponsors were, and that is how big a victory the ruling is for freedom of religious belief and individual conscience, as well as the integrity of the family as the primordial institution of Philippine society.

On the other hand, the ruling did preserve the “core provisions” of the RH law. This is not surprising, not when the justices read the same newspapers that, for example, reported an SWS survey finding that 6 in every 10 Filipinos support the law. (In the same survey, 8 out of 10 respondents also believed the law to be constitutional, but the fact that such a question was even asked—is constitutionality a matter of popularity—says more about the under-handedness of the family planning group who sponsored the survey.)

The ruling in favor of the RH law ought not to upset observant adherents of the Church, a venerable institution that has learned—both from her Founder and from two millennia of bitter experience—that what is Caesar’s is not always what is God’s. Did we really expect this latest battle to be any different, or any easier for us? Instead, let us gird up our loins and pursue an action agenda that may be discerned in the interstices of the favorable ruling of the Court:

(i) The Court ruled that even devices, which do not “primarily” induce abortion can still be called abortifacient. Let us use this to go after IUD’s that prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg—the point at which natural life begins—as well as certain aggressive birth control pills and injectables.

(ii) When government starts offering family planning services and launches the public awareness campaign behind it, let us make sure that natural family planning methods are given equal shelf space and media coverage on a level playing field.

(iii) Independent of government, the Church and its allies should properly resource the operation of natural family planning clinics, which should then be supported by government on the same level playing field principle. If it’s true that only one bishop—Fortich?—has actually gone to the trouble of setting up such clinics throughout his diocese, then the rest of the Philippine bishops must now learn to put their money where their mouths are.

(iv) When reproductive health education starts to be offered to adolescents, especially in non-sectarian public schools, let us make sure that the Church’s positions—on natural family planning vs contraception, on responsible versus premarital sexuality, on the dignity of life versus the pleasures of instant gratification—get an equal hearing. Just because those positions happen to be Catholic ones, does not make them somehow inferior to opposing views that are not religious. Denying the Church equal space in the public commons would, in fact, violate religious freedom as well as separation of church and state. 

People like Catholics for RH, who want to have their cake and eat it too, have been seizing upon certain statements by the new Pope Francis as some kind of endorsement of their cafeteria casuistry. For example, much has been made of just one sentence out of a much lengthier document, in which the Holy Father asked Catholics not to be “obsessed” about something like contraception. 

In no way, shape, or form, of course, do these words amount to a relaxation, let alone a reversal, of settled doctrine. In fact, one might even argue from his statement that this pastoral Pope—considering contraception to be a settled issue—now simply wants us to move forward and not neglect other issues that are less contentious, or that have a greater bearing on other, equally pressing problems of daily life, or that stand a better chance of furthering the apostolic role that Catholics are called to resurrect in their daily lives as the current Year of the Faith draws to a close.

Over two thousand years ago this week, the God-Man who called into being this Church of a billion souls, rode into Jerusalem on a donkey’s back, fearfully aware of the awful fate that awaited Him, and yet bound by obedience to His Father and His love for us all—born and unborn–to embrace it. Who are we, who are any of us, to try and diminish the enormity of that sacrifice into the confines of fickle law or what is merely convenient for us? 

The impending message of Easter is one of life reborn, of the potential for new life, purchased by and embodied in the One True Savior. Regardless of what the justices have ruled, we should not forget that we honor God by honoring—no matter how poor, painful, or disordered it may turn out to be—the gift of life that He offers, to each of us already here and—if we will let them be—to those of us yet unborn. – Rappler.com

Gary Olivar earned graduate degrees from UP and Harvard and went on to a career in banking and telecoms in the Philippines and abroad. He served as the economic spokesperson of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.