On Why This Catholic is Campaigning for State Support for Reproductive Health

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

I am one of those professors from Ateneo that the media branded as defying the Church on the issue of the passage of House Bill 5043 on “Reproductive Health and Population Development.” I’m not really sure if by making the stand we made we were defying the Church, for whom were we defying when we were acting out of Christian love and our informed consciences. And if we were defying the Church, we were doing so in order to respond to the call of love’s conscience. Now that the controversy over the Reproductive Health Bill is raging, I would like to explain my position in lobbying for state support for reproductive health. I don’t want to speak on behalf of my colleagues who so carefully crafted our statement or the signatories who supported our statement with passion and conviction. But I would like to explain why I myself stand so firmly behind our call to pass a law like this.

*editorial cartoon courtesy of The Manila Standard Today

Let me begin by saying that I do, as a student of philosophy and as a person who has grappled with the mysteries of parenthood and human sexuality for most of my life, understand the position of those members of the Church who look at this bill with fear and disapproval. I agree that the emergence of artificial contraceptives has made it easier for us to engage in careless sexual activity. The fact that there are contraceptives that minimize unwanted pregnancies and the spread of disease has probably made it easier for many of us to be promiscuous and this has certainly had an effect on how we give meaning to and value the sexual act.

It’s also possible that some of the contraceptives that are being sold have an abortive effect. It is possible that the pill or the IUD allow implantation to occur and might actually cause a fertilized egg to die. I don’t deny that this is possible and tragic.

I also can sympathize with their hesitation to allow a law to pass that will potentially interfere with how their schools will handle sex education. I also understand their distrust of the government officials’ capacity to design an effective and appropriate syllabus for sex-education. We in the education business know how government bureaucrats can impose short sighted and ill-designed programs that tend to be ineffective if not outright harmful in the formation of young people. And in such a delicate matter such as human sexuality and love, it takes a great act of faith and hope to imagine that the bureaucracy will not mis-educate our children.

However, those truths and possibilities aside, we are faced with the hard and terrible tragedy of millions of women and children whose lives are put at risk everyday only because they do not know many of the basic facts of human reproduction and are unable to access existing technologies that can prevent unwanted pregnancies. It is painful to witness how the undoing or further undoing of countless lives continues when proper information or the availability of effective methods of contraception are denied them. I need only to think of the countless children who grow up facing the violence of poverty that is compounded by the lack of care and nutrition imposed by the sheer size of their families; of the violence inflicted on the bodies of women by the unabated proliferation of their children due to the lack of knowledge and the lack of access to methods that could help them decide the number of children best for their family’s welfare; of the countless people whose creativity and joy is sapped by the constant pressure to find the resources to nourish themselves and their children in a world that can no longer sustain their numbers—and thinking all this, I asked myself how we could deny people a chance to rise from tragedy. Because this bill gives them that chance. It will ensure that young people understand the nature of human sexuality and reproduction so that they can make intelligent decisions about the risky behavior to which they are prone. It will give poor women access to contraception that will give them a fighting chance to have families the size of which can sustain love and care. It will give oppressed women a chance to say no to the abuse on their body and psyches of having large families. And it will give children a chance to develop with a chance at health care, education, and focused parental love. So you see, I and my colleagues are calling for the passage of this bill, not as an act of defiance but as a call of love. We know these parents, we know their children, we weep in our hearts to see how their chance at a decent human life is eroded by what society has denied them. We aren’t saying that responsible parenthood will solve poverty. It won’t, justice will. But this law will give them a chance to live more human lives as they wait for the reign of the Kingdom of God.

In my heart, I understand what the Church fears when it thinks of contraceptives and birth control—it is thinking that the contraceptive mentality is a symptom of a mindset that is not open to grace. For the Church it signals a kind of heart that has no hope and cannot trust in the good will of a loving God. I can see how that can be true and how the propagation of the culture of contraceptives might lead to the degradation of our capacity to be people of faith. It can also lead to the degradation of human sexuality as it will permit sex to be used as a drug to ease the ennui of modern life. I see how the reduction of unwanted pregnancies can do that. However, we do live already in a sinful world where the truth of sexuality especially between loving couples is an unfathomable mystery. Why does sex have such a power on our will such that it draws people to act beyond reason and good sense? Why is it that people think that sex could resolve their malaise, give them a higher esteem of themselves, make them happy, and give them a sense of completion? I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions and much of human existence is involved in trying to understand this mystery. In the meantime children are being born to impossible circumstances and women are being made to suffer preventable hardships.

In our broken and sinful world people are looking for answers and may be acting beyond their better wisdom in their search. Until we come to our wholeness and holiness perhaps we can provide ourselves the tools of prudence so that our search for intimacy and fullness does not have to end in sorrow and greater tragedy. State support for reproductive health will provide us these tools. And so with love for those like us who are broken, but unlike us are deprived of the means to regulate the effects of their tragic fate, we propose that some such bill be passed. Perhaps the Church will want it passed with revisions—but we should not touch its capacity to help people control reproduction through the access to knowledge and safe means. We should especially not water down its mandate to provide support for mothers who care for their children.

And as the secular state passes its laws for the secular good of all its citizens, perhaps it is only right for the Church to redouble its efforts in the education of its people’s hearts. For only a profound and effective education of the heart will bring her people to their good. No amount of intervention in state law will teach the people love. Only a Church that acts as a beacon of love can ultimately teach us what our intimacy is about. In the meantime, let us leave the state to its means to save its poor.