May They Be One: A young man’s view about RH Bill

“Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division.”
-Luke 12:51

IF I WERE Pres. Aquino, maybe I also expressed my support for Reproductive Health Bill (RH Bill); if I were one of the congressmen or senators, perhaps I too am one of those who push for its passage; and if I were one of the columnists in the daily magazines, I may also have been writing in support for the RH Bill, fabricating to the best that I can words to support it and commenting on bishops and the Catholic Church who “meddles” in the State’s affairs.

I bet that one of the most serious problems that the RH Bill brought in is division, seen in the now contradictory views of some Catholics, of the Church and Government officials, and among legislators themselves, especially with regards to the “means” of addressing the problems we face. But I believe that in the end there will still be unity, which can only be achieved through the desire to give the real “good” for the Filipino people. But what then is the good? “The good”, as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas put it “is what everyone desires”. And so therefore, “the good” will surely unite us.

Applying this principle of unity, how can we deal with the predicament on the RH Bill issue? The problem is that there is confusion as to what the real good for us Filipinos consists of. The President says, “This is the good!”, while the Church through its leaders teaches otherwise. In order to reconcile this, we recourse to another unitive principle; this states that ‘the correct and non-conflicting understanding of the good is achieved through the complete knowledge of the truth’. But what then is the truth? How can we arrive at the so-called ‘complete knowledge of the truth’? How can we be sure we are not in error? There is truth in us only when our minds conform to and stand on the actual, existing, and real. Therefore, we can say that our unity will depend solely on our complete knowledge of the truth. Let us make every effort to find this truth and so be guided by it. In my effort to arrive at this truth, I have found interesting things through listening to authoritative sources and reading various reference books. I deem it good to share it here with you.

The first thing is all about over-population, the cornerstone of the controversial RH Bill, the reason why the Bill is pushing for the wide use of contraceptives even to the extent of slicing part of the people’s taxes to finance it distribution. I have learned that ‘population increase’ is not a problem in the Philippines. In fact, there is no such thing as over-population. Researchers have found out that the world’s demographic problem is not over-population but an aging and hardly reversible decline of the number of people because of the entrance and high tolerance of the contraceptive mentality. The so-called “over-population” is no less than a misinterpretation of the abnormal concentration of people in urban areas and cities or capitals. “Over-population is the greatest myth (i.e., lie) of the twentieth century,” commented by some authors. You might be scandalized by this thing but this is the truth and we will find it whenever we seek it. A research study says that if one would gather all the peoples of the world, he can put them all together in a land mass as small as that of Texas, one of the states of America. Truly scandalizing! What is in my mind before is that the earth is already over-populated. But this was a lie, a concealment of the truth! Many people through the use of effective media have been conveying thought to me that we are overpopulated. But this has no conformity with the “real, actual, and existing”. Why tell all these lies? What do they want to happen?

As what I have stated earlier, in the Philippine context the real problem is not that there are many of us Filipinos but rather many of us are poor. But friends, can we blame our number as the root cause of poverty. If you say yes, your opinion conforms to the findings and studies of the experts, the demographers. Their studies show that there is no direct connection between population and poverty. But what really is the cause of the poverty? In my opinion, it is moral decadence, the failure of governance, the corruption of public funds by “public servants” themselves, and the poor education hardly accessible for all, as the most proximate causes of national crises, especially poverty. I am happy that Pres. Aquino chose his political motto, “Kung walang kurap, walang mahirap.” It tells us something true, especially about the evil of corruption. But if we look at the real score, is not the RH Bill a form of corruption too, a kind of moral corruption? (Note: This premise will be treated on the next paragraph) And moral corruption is more serious than the commonly known corruption of public funds itself, because the latter is only one of the many outward manifestations of the former. To our beloved Pres. Aquino, instead of supporting the RH Bill which depopulates, please capitalize from our population.

Posted in: Opinion