“The current food crisis is the result of an imbalance between food and people”, gambits a comment to the Lancet Editorial (April 26, 2008) 1, “you neglect to discuss the people component. This is because we human beings, with the exception of the Chinese, place a tight taboo (the Hardinian taboo2) on controlling our population numbers. We apply the concept of “carrying capacity” to animals, but never to ourselves because we have grown accustomed to the fact that, if we do exceed the ability of our local ecosystem to feed us, we can usually rely on getting food from elsewhere. But what if that ecosystem is the whole world? Is it possible for the world to exceed its carrying capacity?3 Since the causes of the current food crisis seem unlikely to disappear, it probably is.
If there is not enough food, what about fewer mouths? The long-term solution to the current food crisis requires the lifting of the Hardinian taboo, followed by an urgent reduction in global population growth, and if possible in the total population, while hoping that nature does not do it for us first with a calamity such as a pandemic of avian influenza.4 …”.
References
So what is the relevance of the comment to Pinoy society? Something that surfaced from the Church opposition to the Reproductive Health Care Act, House Bill 812. President Arroyo maintains her “pro-life” stand is aligned with that of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines
Flashback to my comments over a decade ago.
SOBER QUESTIONS
A freshly erupted Eraption (witticisms emanating from the proclivity of President “Erap” Estrada to offer one-liner opinions), which usually signals the onset of contentious debate, was about his posture on abortion. He said he opposed it.
This declaration rejuvenates the dormant issue of abortion with sonics raised to a higher decibel level. It will be boosted by the adrenalin induced by the death penalty furor. The death sentence will take center stage once again but this time the principal actor will be the unborn, in an entirely silent and passive mode, so to speak, and the mother in a supporting but vital role.
The abortion issue will split both the erudite and the unlearned into two contending camps: the pro-lifers who oppose abortion absolutely and the pro-choicers who support women’s rights and the mother’s right to decide.
Will the battle be in the field of morality, of right and wrong, sinner or saint? Or will it spill, as it probably will, into the legislative tussles and court litigation?
What are the legal reference points other than the constitutional provision that the state “shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception”?
The terse phrase “from conception” has a parallel in U.S.
Our own Congressman Jaraula, who says he opposes abortion, reveals that a bill on abortion is about to be filed in Congress by a certain Rep. Padilla. How will such a bill fare? The signs indicate stormy weather and very rough sailing.The opponents are formidable. Aside from “Tinex” Jaraula, the most visible are the uncompromising Pope, the Catholic Church, and a hostile Senate. Most daunting of all would be the expected presidential vote.
What relevance does U.S.
For instance, are our solons capable of shedding politics and using only calm reason in elaborating their stance? Will the medical community protect and honor the Hippocratic oath and shun U.S.
Resolution in 2008?
Media coverage of the issues:
In a statement, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, one of the author-proponents of the reproductive bill, said his group “does not intend to gatecrash” the July 25 prayer rally on the Filipino family, as they don’t want to be a party to “this vaudeville of misinformation.”
“It is, however, disheartening that those who claim to be purveyors of truth are, in fact, peddling misinformation,” which is contained in the “Manifesto of Filipino Families.”
a manifesto which the Catholic Church espouses, “will only mire the faithful in ignorance and shackle our women to a life of unremitting pregnancies because it contains deliberate falsehoods.”
“An inordinately huge population growth rate of 2.04 percent imperils family life as a ballooning population impacts adversely on health, education, food security, employment, shelter and the environment – the very essentials of sustainable family life,” he said.
Lagman said that among the “misrepresentations” in the manifesto is the claim that Congress is railroading the family planning bills. This is false, since these bills have been pending in Congress for the past four Congresses, a time period spanning over a decade which belies railroading.
Another is that the laws on reproductive health and family planning eventually lead to the legalization of abortion. This is completely untrue because, on the contrary, a rational and comprehensive national policy on family planning, which includes contraceptive use, reduces significantly the rate of abortion as documented by international studies. Consequently, there is no need to legalize abortion if there is an increased usage of modern and effective contraceptives.Even if it means she could lose her job for going against President Arroyo’s stand, Social Welfare Secretary Esperanza Cabral yesterday maintained her support for the proposed reproductive health bill, which she said would help solve the country’s population problem.
Church official: We stand by CBCP on RH bill
A Church official, reacting to Ozamiz Archbishop Jesus Dosado who earlier declared that supporters of the bill under his diocese will be refused communion, said an advocate of the controversial reproductive health bill pending in Congress may accept the Holy Communion or not on his own volition.
In a Pastoral Letter read in Catholic churches throughout Misamis Occidental, Archbishop Dosado said the debate created by his "no-communion" order was able to "expose the alien anti-life culture which some of them (in government) try to impose upon our unsuspecting people."Letters to the Editor/No abortion involved in many birth regulation methods
Nobody is taking away the right of Catholic priests to express their opposition to population management. By the same token, they should not deny others, particularly non-Catholics, the right to choose the method of regulating birth in their families. Making available the different methods of birth regulation is not the same as forcing them on the population… this approach respects the right of men and women to decide for themselves the method they think would work best for them.
Condoms a no-no even for couples with HIV, says CBCP exec 
An official of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) said on Wednesday there was still no clear directive from the Bullying bishops
The debate about reproductive health has shifted to high gear. Last week, some well-known conservative clerics appear to have threatened to excommunicate progressive politicians who expressed support for abortion (the proposed reproductive health bill to be filed in the House of Representatives when it opens next week). The threat seems to be working - at least on some of the slimier, unprincipled politicians for which this country has become famous
Exercise self-discipline in bed, archbishop tells couples
-- Amid the raging debate on artificial methods of birth control, Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales’s advice to all married couples is to exercise more “self-discipline” and “self-control” in bed.
In his message to the Catholic flock at Friday’s prayer rally marking the 40th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical on the Regulation of Birth or Humanae Vitae, Rosales said the lack of discipline in the marital bed rebounds on other aspects of life.
Because life should be valued and its creation is a serious matter, “there should be discipline and self-control” between couples, the prelate said in Filipino.
Because life should be valued and its creation is a serious matter, “there should be discipline and self-control” between couples, the prelate said in Filipino.
Couples who have the discipline to practice the Church-sanctioned natural family planning methods are “in possession of true values of life” and tend to pass it on to their children. They also tend to be good citizens, he said.
The missing voices of poor women
In the increasingly shrill debate over reproductive health, the voices of poor Filipino women, those most affected by the problem, remain eerily missing. Why this silence?
A study done in 2000 by a Filipino and international research team found that thousands of Filipino women are in effect “practicing family planning” through induced abortion. Shrouded in secrecy, it is their method of preventing the birth of another child.
NGO community organizers report that women friends in Metro Manila’s informal settlements have related intensely disturbing accounts of abortion as the poor woman’s answer to population control. Barely able to feed, clothe and educate four or five young children, and worried about the older ones already living on the streets, a woman who learns that she is pregnant with her fourth or fifth child is likely to abort it. Effective family planning solutions not having been available to her, she sees no other solution.Running out of arguments
Editorial: Tribune 07/23/2008If stupidity marked the presidential spokesmen’s arguments in defense of Gloria Arroyo’s record-breaking drop in public satisfaction rating, so does stupidity mark the Catholic bishops’ argument against the reproductive health bill, which they call the anti-life measure. Talk about misleading “Catholic” statements!
Pampanga Archbishop Paciano Aniceto argued that it was unfair that Catholic taxpayers’ money is being used to fund contraceptives, saying this is the reason churchmen are concerned since they want to make sure that this money from the taxpaying Catholics will not be used against Catholic families.
Now that is really stupid and “unbiblical,” considering that even Jesus Christ did say, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” which could be translated today as the pronouncement on the separation principle between church and state.
But biblical sayings aside, tax payments, whether from Catholics, Protestants, atheists, agnostics and even cultists, have nothing to do with one’s religion or non-religion. These belong to the realm of the state, into which the Catholic church, or any church for that matter, has no business interfering. July 29, 2008
Quezon City Mayor Feliciano Belmonte Jr. cited yesterday the need for the enactment of a national reproductive health law to address the fast growing population of the country.He said that although the family planning program of the government has been devolved to local government units, a national family planning policy is still needed to guide the people.
The mayor said the national policy may be patterned after the newly approved policy ordinance, which will establish the Quezon City Population and Reproductive Health Management Policy, to address the fast growing population in the city, and to speed up delivery of basic services to the people.
“The stand of the city government is that the final choice on how big their family will be is for couples, the government just provides guidance and provides the necessary support,” Belmonte told reporters during a press briefing.
The mayor said the new ordinance would effectively address the growing population of the city, which ballooned from 1.1 million in 1980 to 2 million this year…
July 29, 2008
The “tough choices” made by the administration will help the country survive and emerge stronger from the global food and fuel crunch, President Arroyo said yesterday.
In her 58-minute State of the Nation Address, Mrs. Arroyo also stressed that there is no easy cure for the country’s economic ailment, which she said is global in nature… July 29, 2008
While most female lawmakers wore Filipiniana dresses at the eighth State of the Nation Address of President Arroyo yesterday, a mayor of a fifth-class municipality in Quirino province stole the show, wearing a tribal attire that left little to the imagination.A television report showed Nagtipunan Mayor Rosario Camma in tribal clothing as he arrived at the House of Representatives.
In her speech, Mrs. Arroyo cited Camma, a former chieftain of Bugkalot, for helping 15,000 members of the Bugkalot tribe develop irrigation, plant vegetables and corn and achieve food sufficiency following the distribution of 100,000 Certificates of Ancestral Domain Title (CIDT) for Bugkalots in Quirino, Aurora and Nueva Vizcaya.
Camma apparently proved to all and sundry – senators, congressmen, diplomatic corps, Supreme Court justices and Cabinet members - that it was not cold in the session hall after all, as he just wore his blue G-string during the entire duration of the event.
BOOK: Fatal MisConception: the Struggle to Control World By
In the critical book review, Men gone wild? The politics of population control by Duff Gillespie formerly head, United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) population programme, which is roundly criticized by book author Connelly, Gillespie lashed back:
Connelly considers his book the first “global history of population control”, which, at various times and places, encompasses eugenics, infanticide, pronatalist schemes, restrictive immigration policies, genocide, and family planning. His archival research exhaustively spans the late 1800s through to the mid-1980s, after which his research becomes a bit thin. He includes a numbing number of cameo appearances by the famous, the infamous, and the unknown. Although an occasional nugget of interest can be found in the first part of the book, most readers will find Connelly's attention to minutiae a powerful narcotic.
In his emotively titled chapters “Controlling Nations” and “A System Without a Brain”, Connelly describes how past quixotic attempts to control the world's population coalesced into a “population movement” by the early 1970s. Led by larger-than-life personalities, such as General William Draper and Robert McNamara, then head of the World Bank, the movement spent “lavish” amounts of money on the movement's chosen instrument of population control: family planning. Although the US China , leaders instituted the one-child family programme, and in India
by Duff Gillespie formerly head, United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) population programme, which is roundly criticized by book author Connelly, Gillespie lashed back:
Connelly considers his book the first “global history of population control”, which, at various times and places, encompasses eugenics, infanticide, pronatalist schemes, restrictive immigration policies, genocide, and family planning. His archival research exhaustively spans the late 1800s through to the mid-1980s, after which his research becomes a bit thin. He includes a numbing number of cameo appearances by the famous, the infamous, and the unknown. Although an occasional nugget of interest can be found in the first part of the book, most readers will find Connelly's attention to minutiae a powerful narcotic.
In his emotively titled chapters “Controlling Nations” and “A System Without a Brain”, Connelly describes how past quixotic attempts to control the world's population coalesced into a “population movement” by the early 1970s. Led by larger-than-life personalities, such as General William Draper and Robert McNamara, then head of the World Bank, the movement spent “lavish” amounts of money on the movement's chosen instrument of population control: family planning. Although the US China , leaders instituted the one-child family programme, and in India
Posts
