Bill shall pass

Due to the Church's strong opposition, a Congress bill promoting sex education, the use of contraceptives and accessible birth control medical services on the national level, has never gone out of the House of Representatives since the introduction of its first draft in 1988.

In a statement issued last November, Archbishop Angel Lagdameo of Jaro, president of the CBCP, said the reproductive health bill in its present form "contains fatal flaws" as it poses a serious threat to life of infants in the womb and violates the "sacredness of life from conception".

The Church branded the bill as "anti-life" and said it would promote abortion, even its provisions do not legalize or encourage it.

"We admonish those who are promoting the Bill to consider these matters. It is the duty of every Catholic faithful to form and conform their consciences to the moral teaching of the Church," Lagdameo said.

Lawmakers vying for a stable political career were reluctant to ire the Church to openly and aggressively promote birth control and family planning, thus many remained closet supporters of the controversial bill.

Congressman Edcel Lagman, principal author of the current draft of the reproductive bill, said in an interview that there is an urgent need to guard the freedom of informed choice so that each couple can decide what family planning method would be best for them based on their own beliefs and conscience, with neither the State nor the Church dictating to them

Lagman told Xinhua in an interview that with the support of high-profile politicians, mainstream media, and the civil society, indications for the passage of the bill are now "very encouraging".

"We have 113 co-authors of the bill apart from the two dozen congressmen who have committed to voting for the bill," Lagman said, adding that only 86 votes from the 238-member House of Representatives are needed to endorse it.

A social weather station survey conducted in September 2007 finds seven out of every 10 Philippine adults being polled said they favor the passage of the controversial bill.

"The bill shall pass. Because our chances are big as the Catholic Church is divided and the opposition is not as strong as in 1990s," Celdran said. "But we could still lose the game, most of the congressmen on our side are absent or are forced to be absent on the voting day."

To Floriza, the bickering in Congress seems remote and not of her concern. But she thinks it will be a good idea for schools to provide proper sex education to her daughters to teach them things like how to use condoms and how to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Washing piles of dirty clothes of her kids at the street corner facing the country's oldest Baroque-styled edifice San Agustin Church, Floriza said she was too shy and too lack of knowledge to teach her daughters.

Floriza said what she did was simply forbidding her daughters to date boys before they graduate from high school.

"I often warned them not to follow my footsteps. I had learnt the lessons," she said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 5, 2009)