What Women Want

October 26, 2008

U.S population activist Sharon Camp once suggests that if all the world’s women could determine for themselves when and when not to have children, population problems would resolve themselves with no need for government “control.” And I agree with her enthusiastically.

You see, the traditional view holds that men go out and hunt for food while women give birth and nurture helpless infants to adulthood. Men then kept honing their tools and weapons for bringing down big animals, and human domination then started. However, there is no particular reason to assign men the credit on that, for even after they assumed mastery of weapons and other tools, planetary domination would have eluded them without help. All the meat in the world won’t keep children alive if they aren’t born safely and nurtured with care and vigilance the women who bore them. That suggests some vital roles for women.

Our species wouldn’t have survived without women’s efforts – in fact, not without adaptations that almost surely belonged to women. This is not to say that any particular woman is obligated to perform this task, which I choose not to, or that any man cannot do, the nurturing I mean. Each of us is, or should be, free to choose. It is to say everywhere, at every time in the past, directly assuring a child’s survival to adulthood has been a triumph for which women far more than men can claim credit.

The reason I am tackling this subject is because of the proposed Reproductive Health and Population Development Act of 2008 authored by Rep. Edcel Lagman Rep. Lagman’s bill promotes information on and access to both natural and modern family planning methods, which are medically safe and legally permissible. It assures an enabling environment where women and couples have the freedom of informed choice on the mode of family planning they want to adopt based on their needs, personal convictions and religious beliefs. It does not have any bias for or against either natural or modern family planning. Both modes are contraceptive methods. Their common purpose is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. So what is the issue of the use of artificial and the natural family planning method if their goals are the same? Because one is sanctioned by the church and the other isn’t? Or because one is much effective and the other is not?

There has been a strong, in fact almost violent reaction coming from the church and church-based organizations like Couples for Christ, on the passage of the bill. In fact, no less than Archbishop Paciano B. Ancieto, the chairman of the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines argued that the Reproductive Health Bill is going to lessen the number of people in the country. He said that the population of the country is the best asset the country has and by curbing the growth of the country’s best resource, the Reproductive Health bill is anti-poor. What? Does the good bishop mean we should reproduce more and export manpower overseas or make a meat of each person, sell it in the market and buy food so that others may live? Assuming that the bill would be a success and thus actually would make a dint in decreasing the ballooning population of the country which the government cannot sustain, then we no longer be 85 million hungry Filipinos but at least be reduced to 65 million well-fed and strong people and that is going to be bad, how? Forgive me Bishop, but that argument is lame. It is not the quantity of people who live in an area that matters, it is the quality of the people who dwell in it that is important.

Nowhere in the proposed bill did I see a single provision that promotes abortion or that it is anti-life. The bill expressly provides that “abortion remains a crime” and “prevention of abortion” is essential to fully implement the Reproductive Health Care Program. And although “management of post-abortion complications” is provided, this is not to condone abortion but to promote the humane treatment of women in life-threatening situations in which they don’t have any choice. Young women, unguided and untutored, condemned before they are understood, get pregnant and resorts to illegal abortions, this provision can also help them.

We do know with reasonable clarity what the Philippine population is today and how it is changing. We also know that unrestrained population growth equals unrestricted poverty, yet the opponents of the reproductive health bill don’t see it that way. They believe that by sweeping the issue of expanding population under the rug will somehow lessen the poverty issue, the corruption issue, the peace issue and all other issues that affect the existence of 85 million Filipinos.

Population is a sensitive topic, sensitive because any discussion of population growth quickly taps into an edgy confusion of feelings most of us harbor about contraception, abortion, childbearing and family size, gender relations and sexuality. But it is outstanding how many words have flowed in the population debate, how many heated language and near blows exchanged in the reproductive bill debate without much consideration of the lives of those who bear and raise children.

For us women, it is not just population control, but letting go of control over women’s lives that could lead us safely from between Scylla and Charybdis of poverty and progress, restraint and freedom, servitude and empowerment. (For comments and violent reactions e-mail me at coi_416@hotmail.com)

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Written by admin · Filed Under Columnists, Sai/Mami/Fiscal Eldred Cole