PRI TV SERIES: Three half-hour PRI programs on life and population control will air on EWTN at 9:00 pm ET January 18, 19, and 20. Hosted by Steve Mosher, “Building the Culture of Life” will feature Mexico on Jan. 18, Spain on Jan. 19, and New Zealand on Jan. 20. Please tune in.
January 13, 2006
Volume 8 / Number 2
Too Many Filipinos? Soon, There Won’t Be Enough
Dear Colleague:
Over the years, we have been the leading critic of China’s one-child policy. Our chief goal has been to ensure that U.S. taxpayers are not funding, directly or indirectly, China’s program, and at this we have been successful. A second, closely related goal has been to prevent the U.N. Population Fund from forcing programs of state control over fertility on other countries. This now threatens in the Philippines.
Steven W. Mosher President
As early as Monday, January 16, the House of the Congress of the Philippines will vote on a coercive population control measure pushed by international agencies and their indigenous allies. The Responsible Parenthood and Population Management Act (HB 3773) would discriminate against families with more than two children and force Catholic doctors and nurses to provide sterilizations and contraceptives, probably including the abortifacient morning-after pill. “We know that over 100 congressmen [out of 238] are in favor of the bill but we can depend on only less than 30 to object–those we have lobbied and truly believe in our pro-life stand,” says Sr. Mary Pilar Verzosa, RGS, who heads Pro-Life Philippines.
International population controllers have targeted the Philippines, one of the last majority Christian nations in the world where people still have enough children to guarantee their country’s future. Perhaps because of this, HB 3773 aims to impose a two-child quota on Filipino families, redirecting government resources from programs that help poor Filipinos to programs that will help eliminate them.
Even from a pro-population control perspective, this bill is entirely unnecessary. The Filipino birthrate has been dropping rapidly and, even according to the United Nations Population Division, will drop below the replacement rate of 2.1 in the foreseeable future. Filipinas have gone from having six children, in the course of their lifetimes on average, in 1970 to 5 in 1980, 4 in 1990, and 2.8 today. The UN says that in 20 years, Filipinos will be having fewer children than are necessary to sustain the population. Instead of trying to force Filipinos to have fewer children, Filipino politicians should be trying to figure out how to avoid the coming demographic implosion while there is still time (see PRI’s Weekly Briefing, “Population Controllers Target One of the Last Pro-Family Christian Nations,” July 15, 2005, www.pop.org/main.cfm?EID=837 ).
But big international money comes with anti-people policies, not pro-life ones, and the usual suspects including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) are involved. “Pro-population control agencies such as USAID and UNFPA fund the campaign for the bill to be passed into law,” says Sr. Pilar. “They have attractive-looking ladies on their staff, going from one congressman’s office to another distributing glossy magazines and materials on the importance of the bill, they go on road shows all over the country, and they have set up reproductive health clinics in the provinces. Many local government units, governors and mayors, accept the projects they offer because contraception is integrated with other health services. They also call for press conferences and conduct two- and three-day seminars in big hotels for media people to promote the bill.”
This bill “is an affront to the Culture of Life in the United States and not just in the Philippines,” says Eileen Macapanas Cosby, an American of Filipino descent who has helped organize opposition to HB 3773 through the Filipino Family Fund (www.filipinofamilyfund.org ). “If we let the most Catholic country in the world–87% of nearly 85 million people are Catholic–fall prey to these fringe groups, this will be a huge blow to the pro-family and pro-life movement.”
HB 3773 grants preference in college scholarships to children from families with only one or two children, discriminating against those from families with three or more. Population officers would be mandated in each local district as in Communist China, and surely would have an incentive to use vigorous methods to meet birth limitation quotas. The Filipino Catholic bishops’ conference has already documented instances of forced sterilization in the Philippines, where the contraceptive mentality and overpopulation myth have made steady progress in recent decades.
The bill “violates the freedom of religious belief since it mandates health service providers to implement procedures contrary to their religious beliefs and penalizes them if they refuse,” says Sr. Pilar. “It will corrupt the youth through mandatory sex education that emphasizes contraception and population control, and further reduces the time allotment for more relevant subjects, worsening the already ineffective education system.” Catholic schools are not exempted from the sex education requirement of the bill, and Catholic doctors and nurses could go to jail for six months for refusing to sterilize or distribute contraceptives.
Opponents of the bill hope President Gloria Arroyo will veto the bill if it passes both houses of the Congress, but her veto could be overridden by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.
“The State likewise guarantees universal access to safe, affordable and quality reproductive health care services, methods, devices and relevant information thereon even as it prioritizes the needs of women and children, among other underprivileged sectors,” says HB 3773, although it also says the Philippines’ anti-abortion law won’t be touched. Yet this sort of sweeping language can be interpreted to include just about anything, as UN bureaucrats and courts in other nations have amply demonstrated.
If the Philippines’ birthrate continues to drop, that country will face the same graying population and lack of tax-paying workers that is beginning to crush Western Europe and Japan. Unlike the other two, the Philippines can’t begin to afford financially such a situation. It remains to be seen if the Filipino Congress will side with both freedom and prudence, or help to pass a death sentence on its own people.
Joseph A. D’Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the Population Research Institute.
