By Jose Ma. Montelibano - INQUIRER.net
Close this Someone sent me a text message that Olongapo City passed a Reproductive Health Ordinance. The same text message said that Quezon City was about to follow if not for Bishop Ongtioco.
Because I do not know the details of the Reproductive Health Ordinance that the council of Olongapo City passed, I can only assume from the context of the text message that it is not acceptable to the Catholic Church. Why else would Bishop Ongtioco be responsible for stopping Quezon City from passing a similar ordinance?
The debate rages on. Pro-choice advocates point to the pressure of population growth and its impact on the poor specifically and society in general. Pro-life advocates that controlling population outside of natural modes of family planning is against the very tenets of Christianity and Catholicism. The debate has been going on for a long time. It will continue to go on forever unless the protagonists shift their focus from population intervention to poverty, poverty and poverty.
I am a Catholic. My Church and the renewal community I have joined are, of course, advocates of natural family planning and believe that God never intended for artificial means to pre-empt conception. The valuation of life itself is founded on the principle that God has loaded the dice in favor of a perpetuation of life and counter measures to artificially reverse life-giving directions are wrong - no two buts about it.
At the same time, I am a volunteer worker of Gawad Kalinga. Poverty is our main concern, and the work that we do is community building as the meaningful and sustainable mechanism to address poverty. Population is a concern with Gawad Kalinga. More than most debaters among pro-choice and pro-life advocates, many, if not most, are not consistently involved with working with the poor. They talk about the poor because it is only in the context of poverty that population control has imminent meaning, but talking is different from walking. And if there should be any debate about population control and/or reproductive health, walking the debate can only be in deep involvement in poverty work.
We cannot talk about the poor as though they are numbers. We cannot downgrade the value of human beings as though they are statistics. If we wish to speak in their behalf, we must attain an intimate understanding of what it is to be poor by our presence and participation in their lives. Even studies about animals require experimentation and engagement with them in the field and in the laboratories. Human beings deserve much more, not less.
Many approach population control or reproductive health as a material or secular concern. By doing so, they measure quality by mostly quantity. After all, when we delve more in the physical dimension, measurement can mostly be only in quantities even if what you want to measure is quality. Case in point is poverty. How is poverty measured if not by quantity of what is not available or what cannot be bought because there is no money to buy them?
But poverty is first and foremost a qualitative state. Poverty strips a human being of dignity. It strips him or her of capability. It denies him or her opportunity. Dignity. Capability. Opportunity. All these are firstly, if not totally, qualities instead of quantities. Yes, the lack may be material, but most places in the world do not have material lack, only a lack of equitable possession. The Philippines is a prime example. Our country is considered one of the richest, if not the richest, in biodiversity. Biodiversity means life forms, or expressions of creation. It also means that these life forms exist in abundance because their environment has ample capacity to sustain and perpetuate them.
Why, then, are Filipinos mostly poor? Even if we use the figures of the most optimistic, there are still one-third of Filipinos who are impoverished -- or 30 million. Why, then, are thirty million Filipinos impoverished when they live in a land considered the richest in biodiversity? To say that they do so because of population borders on stupidity, and to say that population control is the main factor to address poverty borders on the same stupidity.
Why don't we say greed? Why don't we say exploitation? Why don't we say ignorance, or stupidity? Why don't we say failure of Christianity? Why, instead, do we say population?
We say so because we have been conditioned to say so. We say so because the developed nations say so, even when they do not say that much of their development was achieved by impoverishing weaker nations, by exploiting their natural wealth, by conquest and forced rule. When the developed world has to account for what they took from the rest of the earth, they will have to share so much more than funding condoms and promoting contraceptives. And condoms and contraceptives are definitely cheaper than penance and restitution.
But having been subservient not only in doing but also in thinking, we have been insidiously led towards a conflict of religious beliefs versus liberalism when it is not a matter of religion. It is, though, a matter of global injustice rooted in colonial greed and dictatorship. It is a matter where might became right, and everyone else has to play catch-up because it is too late to do otherwise. But the most evil of all is to hoodwink human understanding that the poor in the Philippines are responsible for their poverty, that their numbers are the root cause and controlling them is the root answer.
The dynamics of conflict run that way -- protagonists each insist on their own paths, often to the point of conflict. Before they do so, while they do so, and after they do so, the poor remain poor, the poor still suffer, and the poor still have no hope. Ask the poor about the theology of pro-life. Ask the poor about the benefits of pro-choice. Ask them if any side matters, if any side brings food to the table, brings the medicine to the sick child, brings the decent home and community which provide security and harmony, brings kindness and attention to the neglected, brings fairness back to society. Ask the poor, and then, ask ourselves. But, please, do not rub salt to their wounds, do shift the onus of their plight on them and away from the truly guilty.
Labels: catholic, olongapo, reproductive health
