Fundamentalism versus Reason

The surreal dynamics of that encounter between benightedness and enlightenment has been replayed in the House in the last few months, as shown by the passionate exchanges, on and off the House floor, provoked by  the anti-RH interpellators’ oft-repeated questions and assertions:

Q.  Didn’t God tell Adam and Eve to go forth and multiply?

A. Yes, but Adam and Eve were the only two persons in the world at the time.  Now, we have seven billion people.

Q. Contraception is forbidden by God, and one way to show his displeasure at the House’s taking up the measure during the 14th Congress was his sending the destructive Typhoon Ondoy in September 2009.

A.  It is forbidden by the Pope, not God.  Other religions, such as Islam, and other Christian denominations, like the Iglesia ni Cristo, see contraception as ethically and morally acceptable.  As for Ondoy being a sign of God’s wrath, we obviously have no way of discerning divine intent.

Q. Contraception is abortion.

A. Contraception prevents fertilization–the sperm from meeting the egg–so there is nothing or no one to abort.

Q.  Contraceptives are abortifacients.

A.  Contraceptives marketed in the Philippines are cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, which has not found them to be abortifacients.  Let us leave the determination of whether or not a contraceptive is abortifacient to the appropriate government agencies, which have the expert skills to do this, rather than have us amateurs in Congress make the decision.

Q.  Doesnn’t contraception inevitably lead to abortion?

A. The RH Bill explicitly opposes abortion.  And by providing reproducticve counseling to the young and making both counseling and contraceptives available to the poor, the RH Bill will lead to a decline in the rate of induced abortions, which now comes to 470,000 a year, since many of these stem from unwanted pregnancies.

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