Overdue on RH*

I said I don’t want to blog politics anymore. But I feel like this one is inevitable. I am merely speaking as a woman, an educated woman who cares for her body and the future of her soon-to-be-family, who is aware of the dangers of giving birth and how mothers die giving birth when it could’ve been avoided to start with, the peril of sexually transmitted diseases spreading, the degrading economic conditions and how poverty is at all time high. Yes you might judge me for my agnosticism, or my past and current political affiliations for my biases, and that I am a rebel without a cause bratting my way into this debate

I am not as articulate as I used to, I realized; I have not read 60-page readings on the subject at hand to back me up. However, I cannot quite create a coherent wordplay to express my disdain on the Catholic Church for spoon-feeding, if not brainwashing their followers into a state of sublime naïveté on the matter. Again, I am not an expert; I will not debate and challenge friars, fanatics and pompous asses. This is just my two cents, free-flowing.

The Bible did not fall from the heaven, inscribed by lightning, landed on earth to be our sole guide in everything. If anything, it is a history book, a literary piece, a constitution of sorts if you will; and just like any constitution, it may be subject to amendments once it’s proven to be untimely. Jesus, is anything, is an icon, a revolutionary. I am not an atheist, though. I do believe in some form of Higher Power or Supreme Being. But the dogma of Catholicism is too much. Believe me, I studied in a “Catholic School” and was even dubbed Best in Christian Living. But if there’s one thing that I understood well in the Old Book, it is that human beings have freewill and I am merely practicing it. That has been my principle. Freedom. Tolerance. Freewill. I am free to to know, to understand, to analyze, to challenge theories and create my own ones if I found those existing to be insufficient and incapable of satisfying all my questions. The world, the society we live in, the technology we posses exists because of people who ask, who challenge and are not satisfied with what is just being handed to them. I feel the deepest of contempt to the blind followers.

Sure, the natural family planning method worked back circa 15 AD to 1940s, when the earth still needed inhabitants. But now, people are fighting for the most basic resources to survive. I think earth doesn’t need more inhabitants, I’m definite we’re nearing the threshold of earth’s capacity population-wise. The people are suffering because of this: low quality education, high poverty rate, rotten health care and social welfare programs, mass hunger. Awareness is the key to responsibility. If the Church continues to instill the idea of ‘sex is taboo’, people will never learn.

Sex is good, it is primal. The result of which is an infant (Juno, 2007). But if the parents cannot provide a good life to the kid, if the parents cannot even provide nourishment to the baby because they have seven more that they also need to feed, if the children resort to begging in the streets, if the mother will have to die giving birth because of lack of options, leaving the father raising a kid by himself, if the children will have to literally fight for a chance to quality education and health care. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the couple had an option firsthand on how they’ll go about with their sexual affairs and were clear with the size of the family that they want? As such all the needs will be provided to these children. Don’t get me wrong, I am all about family, and that it should provide the children the proper building blocks of life, values and principles for the next generation who will inherit our country and our world.

The RH Bill is not about legalizing abortion. It must be seen and understood in it’s complexity, how it has the capacity to solve the grassroots problem that escalates into the economic crisis we’re experiencing. It is about giving better options, to provide better life that will produce better people that will create a better country and a better world.

I’ve heard this on the news, unsure of the verbatim, but in essence: Catholics are not to be bound by the RH Bill.

My reply: Filipinos are not bound by Catholicism neither. We are all only bound by our own decisions based on freewill.

But then again, that’s just me. An opinion, not an absolute truth. After all, no one controls the monopoly of truth… or wisdom. Unless you're a tyrannical fascist with the worst case of Megalomania.


* I wrote this last October 4, 2010.