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By Francisco S. Tatad
House Bill No. 5043 is titled
“An Act Providing For National Policy On Reproductive Health,
Responsible Parenthood and Population Development and For Other
Purposes.” Until it reached the floor for debate, I had thought it
sufficient to dwell simply on the general principles of legislation
and the basic provisions of the Constitution on human life, family
and marriage to show that the bill has no place in our law.
The first point I tried to make
is that there are certain activities of man as man, which are not
subject to state regulation of any sort. These involve fundamental
human rights that precede and transcend the State, such as the right
to breathe, the right to think, the right to feel, the right to
love, the right to hope, the right to believe.
The State has no business
instructing the citizen, by law, how to breathe, how to think, how
to feel, how to love, how to hope, how to believe. Under our
Constitution, it may not even instruct congressmen how to
interpellate, journalists how to write, broadcasters how to read the
news.
Anyone who understands what has
been said so far should have no difficulty understanding that the
State has no business instructing married couples that they should
first contracept or get themselves sterilized before they could
engage in sexual intercourse.
The bill’s proponents seem
completely unable or unwilling to grasp this rather plain and simple
point. They seem to believe that they can legislate anything they
want to legislate simply because they sit in Congress. This is a
serious moral and intellectual disorder which finds support only in
totalitarian states where the legislator need not sit in Congress.
We are not yet a totalitarian state.
The second point I tried to make
is that no proposed statute can possibly prosper which seeks to
amend, or go around or against the Constitution outside of the
constitutional amendatory process. And HB 5043 more than amply does
this.
Article II, Section 12 of the
Constitution is, or ought to be, a sufficient bar to HB 5043. “The
State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and
strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It
shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the
unborn from conception. The natural and primary right and duty of
parents in the rearing of the youth for civic efficiency and the
development of moral character shall receive the support of the
Government.”
The provision, though not
self-enforcing, needs no interpretation. Family life is sacred; it
possesses a quality that belongs primarily to God. The family is the
starting point of society and should be left alone to do its work as
a family; the State’s duty is to protect it against all threats,
including those coming from the State itself. The moral character of
the youth is not likely to be developed by concentrating their minds
on hedonistic sex.
By this provision, the
Constitution bans abortion, but not contraception or sterilization.
But can the State be an honest protector of the life of the mother
and the life of the unborn from the moment of conception if its
first business is to prevent women from conceiving? Of course not.
So the necessary implication of Sec. 12, Article II is a ban on
state-sponsored or state-mediated contraception and sterilization,
even though there is no such ban on private parties.
Even without the above provision,
the whole Article XV on “The Family” should suffice. This
recognizes marriage as “an inviolable social institution,”
“the foundation of the family,” which shall be “protected by
the State.” It further recognizes the Filipino family as the
“foundation of the nation” and obliges the State to
“strengthen its solidarity and actively promote its total
development.” It further obliges the State to defend “the right
of spouses to found a family according to their religious
convictions and the demands of responsible parenthood.”
Unless the Constitution has
become a mere scrap of paper, these provisions should have barred
the House of Representatives from approving HB 5043 at committee
level. Even if all the economic justifications, which had been
thoroughly discredited, had more teeth, the moral and constitutional
bar, which the bill has failed to hurdle, should have prompted the
committees to send it to the archives.
But there was a brazen attempt to
steamroll the bill. Four reproductive health bills had been referred
jointly to the House committees on Health and on Population and
Family Relations. On April 29, 2008, the committees heard three of
the four bills. They set a second hearing for May 21, 2008. But when
the committees met on that date, the presiding officer announced
that they would now deliberate on “the substitute bill” to the
four bills. And on one member’s motion, the committees approved
“the substitute bill.” No further hearing.
This was in violation of the
constitutional provision, and a rule of the House, which mandate
adequate consultations with families or family associations. The
statement that the same bill had been heard in previous congresses,
even if true, is irrelevant and immaterial, since all bills that
fail to be acted upon by a particular congress die at the end of
that congress. If any bill be refiled in a new congress, it should
go through the legislative mill as though it was being filed for the
first time.
Nowhere in the records does it
appear that the joint committees ever instructed any officer or
group of officers to consolidate the bills into one. The chair’s
statement and the member’s motion spoke of “the substitute
bill” as already in being, without need of a motion that it first
be created.
Normally, bills are consolidated
by a technical working group (TWG) created by the committee or joint
committees upon a member’s motion to consolidate. There was no
such motion, and no TWG was ever created. Where then did the
substitute bill emanate?
Upon interpellation, the sponsor,
who surprisingly is not the committee chair endorsing the bill, but
rather the principal author himself, was reported to have said that
the authors of the four component bills did it.
If true, it was highly irregular.
Why? Because at that stage the bills were already under the joint
committees’ jurisdiction and control, and nothing on record shows
they had asked the authors to consolidate.
If false, which seems more
likely, a serious ethical question arises, which completely vitiates
the integrity of the proceedings, and which must be resolved by the
House Ethics committee, before which it should now be raised.
This is not a trifling
technicality. There is loud talk in the House that the substitute
bill, as well as the original component bills, was produced by a
foreign-funded nongovernment entity, called the Philippine
Legislators Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD). PLCPD
falls under the classification of “foreign agent,” according to
the Foreign Agents Act of 1979, which I had the honor of initiating
at the interim Batasang Pambansa.
The fact that all the
reproductive health bills in the House and the Senate tend to read
and sound alike, both in style and in content, and that PLCPD had
been running ads urging passage of the bill, while David and Lucile
Packard Foundation, one of its foreign funders, had criticized the
government for the slowdown in its purchase of contraceptives, seem
to provide more than ample basis for the loud talk in the House.
What foreign interests are behind
the wild and moneyed push for this bill? Why are so many
foreign-funded NGOs, featuring brand and customary
“nationalists,” trying to ride roughshod over the Constitution
and Catholic objections to it on moral and constitutional grounds?
The answer may be downloaded on
the Internet. Population control has a long history. It began in
antiquity, but it became an invasive global political force in 1974
after Henry Kissinger came up with National Security Study
Memorandum (NSSM) 200, titled “Implications of Worldwide
Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests.”
This secret document created the
template for the global population action plan that called for a
two-child family worldwide by the year 2000. Since then the greying
and dying of the population of the West has exposed the folly of
this plan. But some people still want to dance the dance. Just who
are making them dance?
Regardless of the motives and
agendas imbedded in HB 5043, as a piece of legislation, it is shot
through with holes. It cannot survive an honest House. As stated in
the beginning, the bill is titled, “An Act Providing For A
National Policy On Reproductive Health, Responsible Parenthood and
Population Development, And For Other Purposes.”
The Constitution provides that
“every bill passed by the Congress shall embrace only one subject
which shall be expressed in the title thereof.” The bill’s
failure to reflect its penal nature in its title is a constitutional
violation; the fact that it contains three separate
subjects—reproductive health, responsible parenthood, and
population development—which it tries, unsuccessfully, to link
together, is another.
But the bill’s most obvious and
ultimately insurmountable defect is that it seeks to “provide” a
national policy where the Constitution already provides one. You
read this in Article II, “Declaration of Principles and State
Policies,” eloquently spread out from Section 9 to Sec. 18 or
further.
Congress can only implement the
policy laid out in the Constitution. It cannot hope to replace or
revise it. Of course, one may now try to amend the title to say that
the bill is “implementing” the constitutional policy rather than
trying to provide a new one. That, however, cannot stand. The
contents of HB 5043 do not at all reflect the substance of the
constitutional policy; they rather seek to deny, assault and pervert
the same.
One final point. Assume (arguendo)
that the constitutional policy did not at all exist, the
government’s contraceptives and sterilization program—illegal as
it is—already exists. You only need to play back then Health
Secretary Johnny Flavier’s proud boast before his NGO crowd at the
1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo
to confirm it. The fat outlays inserted in the present and next
year’s budgets for reproductive health further confirm it.
After all is said and done, is HB
5043 not, in fact, an attempt to legalize an illegal program that
has been there for years?
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