It is tempting to comment on the botched hostage rescue operations last Aug. 23 when SWAT teams stormed a tourist bus where a dismissed police officer was holding hostage tourists from Hong Kong, resulting in the death of eight hostages and the hostage-taker. But with the joint investigation by Manila and Hong Kong forensic teams going on, I’d rather move on and leave the self-flagellation to others.
There is a standard policy among damage control experts that when your client is at the losing end of a controversy, it is better to remain silent after the client has explained his position. The Philippines is definitely at the losing end of this raging controversy, and since the police and the national government has admitted and apologized for the obvious blunders in handling the hostage situation, I’d rather not contribute to the self-flagellation that Filipinos have been kaing on themselves and their country for several days now.
Let the people of Hong Kong vent out their anger and sorrow. They have every right to do so. In the meantime, let us allow the investigators to do their job, and as a nation beset with more pressing problems, let us move on.
I am more concerned with a different kind of hostage situation, the one that the Roman Catholic Church has imposed on Philippine officials for many years. For decades, the Church has held hostage Congress and the national government, threatening to withdraw its support from anybody who would push a population control program that would use contraceptives, instead of just natural methods.
In the last election campaign, the Catholic hierarchy said it would campaign against candidates who would support the Reproductive Health Bill which was then pending in Congress. One by one, those who had originally supported the bill withdrew their support, fearing a backlash from the influential Roman Catholic Church.
Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III stood his ground, but he still emerged the winner in the presidential election by 5 million votes. Despite the repudiation, the Catholic bishops continue to pressure Aquino on population control policy. But apparently, Aquino is still holding his ground.
On the occasion of World Population Day on July 12, less than two weeks after Aquino formally assumed the presidency, Health Secretary Enrique Ona announced that the new administration is boosting the country’s family planning program, and that he would propose the procurement of contraceptives using government funds.
Ona said that to effectively promote responsible parenthood, couples should be allowed to make informed choices by exposing them to all methods of population management.
“The couple should be given freedom to decide how many children they would like to have. That’s normal. Every couple does that. And so it is very important that they are given all the necessary information on how they may (decide on) the number of children, the spacing of children,” he said.
Ona said it is the duty of the government to make information and services on artificial and natural or scientific methods of family planning available to couples.
“Teach them (couples) all of these, give them the options and then let them decide… But we all agree on the value of life. So it is very clear that we are against abortion,” he said.
On the same day, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) issued a pastoral statement reminding Aquino that the government’s program of promoting a contraceptive mentality through education and medical practices is immoral and would not bring good to the people.
Apparently, the bishops’ warning fell on deaf ears. Just last Monday, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported that the government has started implementing a new family planning marketing strategy designed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The “May Plano Ako” program, according to the Inquirer, “targets not only women but also men and young people” on the importance of family planning and contraceptive use, according to a top official of the Department of Health (DoH).
The US Embassy in Manila has acknowledged Washington’s active role in the Philippine government’s family planning initiatives.
Former Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral said the state needed to “bring it (population growth rate) down (from 2.04 percent in 2008) to a level of 1.3 to 1.4 percent per annum where the population will stabilize.”
If the Philippines maintains its 2.04-percent growth rate, the Philippines will break the 100-million mark in four years! In any language, this number is astronomical and alarming for a country that is just slightly larger than Arizona (population: 6.16 million) and where close to 40% of the population are languishing below the poverty level.
Most of the Philippines’ neighbors have drastically reduced their population growth rate, but the Philippines continues to have an alarming population growth rate. Vietnam had an average annual growth rate of 1.4 percent from 2001 to 2006; Indonesia, 1.3 percent; and Thailand, 0.8 percent. Malaysia has about the same growth rate as the Philippines at 2.1 percent from 2001 to 2006.
In 2004, the Philippines was already the 14th most populous country in the world while Metro Manila was the 11th most populous metropolis.
Economic managers have pinpointed the rapid population growth as one of the biggest threats to sustainable economic growth. With more than one million babies born every year, the population will continue to put pressure on the country’s basic social services and declining natural resources. The added population will be competing for the scarce resources in the future, such as healthcare, education, food, clothing and employment.
In the gloom that the bungled hostage crisis has brought upon the Filipino people, it is heartening to know that the government is at least confronting the hostage situation involving population control the right way.
(valabelgas@aol.com)
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