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Tomorrow, April 8 2014, the Philippine Supreme Court will decide whether the hotly contested Reproductive Health, a.k.a. Responsible Parenthood Law, passed by congress a little two years ago, is constitutional or not. A few months after it was passed, the Supreme Court stopped the law from being implemented via a TRO and later extended that restraining order indefinitely until its constitutionality could be addressed by the court with finality.
In my 20 years of practice, I’ve come across many claims of instant cures or cure-all devices that have eventually been proven to be either scams or just plain failures. I suppose it is in man’s nature to seek out easy ways or all-encompassing ways of alleviating pain or solving social problems.
I am praying, with Christian optimism, that the law will be struck down because, all things considered, there is no good evidence to show that any country that has institutionalized a population control program, ended up on the “greener side” of the fence. We know (and the pro-RH people are in denial here) that there is always a downside when you mess with natural law. What is amusing with the arguments of those who are for the RH Law’s implementation is that they think it is a panacea against our country’s ills, i.e.; maternal mortality, teen pregnancy, poverty, hunger and excessive urban population density. But the fact is, like my experience in the healthcare profession, social problems like these have no panacea, certainly not a law that will itself bring more harm to the cultural and social landscape of our country.
To desire the implementation of this “snake oil” which is the RH law is plainly and simply a result of moral sloth. The desire to accomplish social change by coercion decorated with token conscientious objection clauses, is how every country, who now kills their young, started out. It is laziness because it is a refusal to take the more difficult road of making society good by reaching in and tapping the core goodness of human nature by forming values and morals, thus bringing about the authentic transformation of the person. This is what the Church has been trying to say and what the proponents and supporters of the RH Law seem to miss; that the “cure” to our social problems does not reside in pills and sex education but moral transformation and values education, the hard road with deep foundations, not the easy road made of dirt and is easily washed away.
If the RH Law is deemed constitutional in part or as a whole, this will be the start of our country’s crossing into the declining culture’s point of no return. God help us all.
TheStrugglingDad 