Life and Choices

As Congress reopens tomorrow, one of the top items, and perhaps the most controversial, in the agenda would be the proposed reproductive and population management bill.

While our representatives took a recess, the debate over the issue did not really let up, in fact it raged on outside the halls of Congress – in media, in the streets, in church, and in many a corner store and barber shop. Now that is a good thing. All these discussions are opportune and long overdue. It is about time that we, as Filipinos and the biggest Catholic nation in Asia, started earnestly confronting the population issue in the country.

Hopefully the deliberations at the different levels will lead to a higher collective awareness about the need for parents and individuals to be more responsible; for more women to be educated about reproductive health; and the need for government to adopt policies that will help decrease mortality rate and improve children’s health and education.

As the debates have been heating up, the age-old brandings of pro-life versus pro-choice have re-emerged, with basically the Church claiming to be the former while the proponents and supporters of the proposed bill the latter. But it’s a great disservice to our people to allow the debate to be reduced to mere name-calling and labeling as being pro-life, pro-Church, anti-life or pro-choice, anti-Christian, etc.

Life is much too precious and sacred for the debate to be trivialized with labels. There is need to see beyond what the contentious issues are and sift through the facts, allegations and representations by interested parties, including the Church and other sects, the politicians, the women sector, and the medical sector.

A calm and rational look at the different positions will clearly lead us to conclude that the positions of both government and Church do not reject each other, in fact they complement each other. For our people’s benefit, both can and must pursue their own respective mandate and teaching. For starters, both are against abortion, and this is good. However, offering alternatives is not enough; both institutions must put their money where their mouths are by devoting resources to continuously educate communities – the women, the youth, the men – about their respective alternatives.

The Church and other religious sects should sustain their teaching about the morality of reproduction to help parents and individuals make informed choices on safe alternatives offered to them by government and non-government groups, while government must revisit the law on abortion and strengthen it to support the campaign for responsible parenthood.

At the end of the day, the ongoing debate and the challenges posed by the issues on reproduction and population redound to the welfare of our nation’s children – both born and yet to be born – whose future greatly depends on the decisions that we, the adults, make.

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