So. It looks like Alma Moreno no longer has any reservations.
In 2012, the long-debated and highly controversial RH Bill was signed into law. This was a law that designated basic reproductive health rights, education, and information that was meant to benefit people not so much as it is for population control per se, but to promote age-appropriate knowledge about the birds and the bees.
Ultimately, all that sex education goes to waste if you’re too poor to afford contraception, which is not unlikely for the millions of Filipinos living below the poverty line. You need to provide for them, given that they’re the people most unlikely to be able to provide well for the children they have.
Surprise, surprise: a significant chunk of that funding is gone. And the Senate just let it happen. And that’s a problem. A huge one. And we know that the detractors of the RH Law are happy this happened, but this is very narrow-minded, especially from a pro-life point of view. Removing funding from the RH Law is like watching a Destiny’s Child reunion without Beyoncé.
Here are 8 reasons why this will cause more harm than good.
When your choices are to “lay and pray” in a non-MMA sense and to spend money for contraception instead of using it to feed your family, then no amount of knowledge would help you, because not everyone is the paragon of moral restraint—especially when the people in question are already married, to begin with.
The Net Effect: Defunding contraceptives would make any other facet of RH Law ultimately useless. Being educated about choices but not having the means to make these choices is effectively taunting the people who need these choices the most.
And no, we don’t mean the tech schools. Aside from preventing unplanned pregnancies, contraceptions, particularly condoms, help prevent STI’s, because let’s face it: you can’t demand people stop having sex. They will. And they will do it unprotected, if needed be.
The Net Effect: We have problems with HIV transmission, numerous STI’s, and the mistaken notion in the LGBT community that they don’t need protection because they can’t get pregnant. The RH Law helps alleviate that issue. Defunding contraceptions means the issue will remain completely unchecked.
There is this silly notion that pharmaceutical companies stand to benefit so much from selling us contraception, which sounds like a great story, until you realize most pharmaceutical companies also sell more expensive drugs for kids. Whoops.
The Net Effect: Big Pharma will make more money from a population explosion than from selling contraceptives. This should be very obvious, but it’s easy for us to forget that.
We all know why this is happening: the church opposes contraceptives, as is its business, since it’s trying to make morally perfect people out of us. What they don’t realize is that this is not the job of the government. The government isn’t a tool to legislate and enforce morality, especially the kind that is not universal.
The Net Effect: We remove access to contraceptives from anyone, based on the dominant religion. In short, we say “screw the minorities” yet again. How is this equality and humane treatment for all?
For as long as we think contraceptives = immoral, then we will keep going around and around in circles over this issue. It’s high time we stop talking that way, especially when you consider the position of anti-contraceptives in certain places (thankfully not here in the Philippines) is usually a package deal with pro-guns. Apparently a tool meant for shooting is not inherently evil but a tool meant to prevent infections and unwanted pregnancies is inherently evil. Talk about priorities.
The Net Effect: Less condoms, more guns. But again, we’re not America, so it’s not that bad for us, at least. We have that going for us, at least.
People used to ask “why do we need RH Law when we already have these options available to us anyway?” Funding was the very key difference.
The Net Effect: RH Law becomes just another useless law in a litany of useless laws made by the government if you strip it of contraception funding.
No conception, no abortion. It’s that simple. But because we think people who end up getting pregnant because they have no access to contraceptives will magically become model parents, we forget that desperation will hit them more often, making abortions more likely. This is the equivalent of removing seatbelts from cars so that people would be forced to drive more carefully: it’s patently moronic.
The Net Effect: The CBCP insists that a contraceptive mentality will precede an abortion mentality. This is gibberish. Instead, we can only expect an upswing of illegal abortions in 2016 if this defunding does carry on as expected.
We keep seeing people speak from privilege, saying “if I can’t afford a condom, then I simply will abstain from intercourse.” Easy for you to say, when you think a condom is just cheap and you can amuse yourself with your iPhone when you’re in the bedroom. The problem is, not everybody is as privileged as you, and literally, their only recreation involves hiding the salami with their wife, which means it isn’t even a moral objection for them to be doing it. But because they’re poor, apparently, anti-RH people are saying “screw ‘em,” while letting ‘em do just that without any contraception.
The Net Effect: While some anti-RH people clearly like using contraceptives anyways, they would rather deny poor people that option. That is the height of selfishness and hypocrisy.
