Monday, April 27, 2009

RH includes abortion

WE have to be wary when the proponents say that their Reproductive Health Bill does not include abortion. Given the country’s still Christian culture, they naturally would not openly say so.

They certainly would go on denial mode, and employ ambiguous words, much like a squid tactic. This has always been the pattern of their campaign. But pieces of evidence to the contrary are aplenty.

In the first place, all this business of promoting Reproductive Health is a global effort organized by some ideologues who want to impose their ideas on the whole world. Bluntly put, what is waged is a war between Christian faith and secularized ideology.

Let’s not be deceived by their strategy. They want us to believe that the issue involved is only a socio-economic matter, that it’s just a question of practicality.

The RH bill is touted to respect freedom, to allow people an informed choice on family planning methods, to improve their quality of life, etc. These are tricks to sidetrack us from the real issue. Paraphrasing former US President Clinton, we can say: read my lips, it is morality, not economics, stupid!

Making the RH bill into a law will enable the ideologues to use government resources and structure for their social engineering. It will use the government to reshape people’s minds and ways according to their tenets.

Obviously, the RH bill proponents can count on a certain degree of popularity. They also can bank on tremendous financial support. But when the bone of contention is on morality, these aspects should only play secondary, not leading roles, in resolving it.

What we have in Congress is not an original brilliant idea of some of our lawmakers. It’s a handed down copy, at least in substance, of the Reproductive Health laws now blighting many countries all over the world, all of them including abortion.

We can be sure that the RH bill is a part of a worldwide lobby network that the liberal ideologues are trying to establish. In spite of its apparent popularity, based on their own surveys, it does not spring from the objective needs of our people. It’s an imported and contrived move, not a spontaneous one.

With such context, the RH bill can include, at least, implicitly, the possibility of abortion. It just cannot stop at contraception. It has to go all the way. In fact, no less than Mrs. Hillary Clinton says so.

In a recent hearing of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressman Chris Smith asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

“Does the United States’ definition of the term 1) ‘reproductive health’ or 2) ‘reproductive services’ or 3) ‘reproductive rights’, include abortion?”

Mrs. Clinton answered:

“We have a very fundamental disagreement. It is my strongly held view that you are entitled to advocate, and everyone who agrees with you should be free to do so, anywhere in the world. And so are we.”

“We happen to think that family planning is an important part of women’s health and reproductive health includes access to abortion that I believe should be safe, legal and rare.”

If the thinking of the current US administration is to include access to abortion under reproductive health, we have no business saying our own version will not include it.

How can we resist legalizing abortion when the fine print of the term “reproductive health” already includes abortion? In many documents of NGOs and even of the UN, the concern over maternal mortality and unsafe abortion is actually a code for legalizing abortion.

In countries where abortion is now legalized, the road to it started with these altruistic-sounding affairs.

Give it a few more years, come out with more favorable surveys, then the natural ugliness of abortion will disappear in the minds of our people, and abortion will sooner or later be made part of the family planning methods that everyone should be given an informed choice of.

This is precisely the pattern in their campaign, their strategy to do some social engineering according to their principles. It can skillfully use the democratic system, with vast appeal to freedom and people’s rights, but being vulnerable to abuses, they are emptied of their real and original value.

We have to expose the wolf in sheep’s clothing that is the Reproductive Health Bill, now waiting for approval in our Congress.

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