With Due Respect

Why RH decision is cheered by both sides

By Artemio V. Panganiban
Philippine Daily Inquirer

As soon as the Supreme Court decision (Imbong vs Ochoa, April 8, 2014) on the RH Law (Republic Act No. 10354) was announced, both the petitioners and the respondents instantly burst out with cheers of victory.

Not unconstitutional. After reading the 106-page ponencia written by Justice Jose Catral Mendoza (plus the separate opinions of CJ Maria Lourdes P.A. Sereno that is written in elegant and idiomatic Filipino, and of Justices Antonio T. Carpio, Teresita  J. Leonardo-De Castro, Arturo D. Brion, Mariano C. Del Castillo, Roberto A. Abad, Bienvenido L. Reyes, Estela M. Perlas-Bernabe and Marvic Mario Victor F. Leonen), I understood why both sides were jubilant.

Cheered by the pro-RH respondents was the decision’s emphatic fallo, that RA 10354 is “NOT UNCONSTITUTIONAL (emphasis in original) except (italics in original) with respect to [eight] provisions which are declared UNCONSTITUTIONAL (emphasis in original).” (p.103)

Further, the “Status Quo Ante Order” (SQAO) was LIFTED, thereby allowing the immediate enforcement of the entire law, except for the said eight provisions.

Thus, the government and pro-RH activists may now “provide Filipinos, especially the poor and the marginalized, access [to] and information [on] the full range of modern family planning methods, and ensure that [the RH Law’s] objective to provide for the people’s right to reproductive health [is] achieved… [and make] it mandatory for health providers to provide information on the full range of modern family planning methods, supplies and services, and for schools to provide reproductive health education.” (p.23)

In short, with the emphatic fallo and the lifting of the SQAO, the RH Law may now be used as “an enhancement measure to fortify and make effective the current laws on contraception, women’s health and population control.” (p.23)

Major victory. On the other hand, “[t]he Court…  agree[d] with the petitioners’ contention that the whole idea of contraception pervades the entire RH Law.” (p.35) Thus, the prolifers prayed for the unconstitutionality of the entire RH Law. They focused on Sec. 4(a) which allowed the use of contraceptives that prevent the fertilized ovum from reaching, and being implanted in, the mother’s womb. To them, this is plain abortion because life begins at fertilization—that is, upon the union of the human sperm and egg.

The Court’s assent to this focus and its unwavering protection of the fertilized ovum is a major victory for the anti-RH petitioners. The tribunal held that “every human being enjoys the right to life. Even if not formally established, the right to life, being grounded on natural law, is inherent and, therefore, not a creation of, or dependent upon a particular law, custom, or belief.” (p.38)

“While the Court has opted not to make any determination, at this stage, when life begins, it finds that the RH Law itself clearly mandates that the protection be afforded from the moment of fertilization (bold type in original). As pointed out by Justice Carpio, the RH Law is replete with provisions that embody the policy of the law to protect the fertilized ovum and that it should be afforded safe travel to the uterus for implantation.” (p.49)

Notably, the constitutional framers, especially Commissioners Bernardo M. Villegas and Hilario G. Davide Jr., stressed during the constitutional deliberations that when the Charter spoke of protecting life “from the moment of conception,” it truly referred to the moment when “the ovum is fertilized by the sperm.” (p.43)

Ruled the Court: “In all, whether it be taken from a plain meaning, or understood under medical parlance, and more importantly, following the intention of the framers of the Constitution, the undeniable conclusion is that a zygote is a human organism and that the life of a new human being commences at a scientifically well-defined moment of conception, that is, upon fertilization. For the above reasons, the Court cannot subscribe to the theory advocated by Hon. [Edcel] Lagman that life begins at implantation.” (p.47)

Other victories. While the State cannot be prevented by religious objectors from promoting the use of nonabortifacient contraceptives, nonetheless, it cannot force health professionals, whether from the public or private sector, to use or prescribe the use of any contraceptive, device or procedure.

Neither may these conscientious objectors be forced to refer to other health providers “a patient seeking information on modern reproductive health products, services, procedures and methods.” (p.72)

The Court said that prolife health providers cannot be compelled to “do indirectly what they cannot do directly.” (p.72) To force them “to act contrary to [their] religious belief and conviction would be violative of the principle of non-coercion” enshrined in the Charter. (p.73)

While, as a rule, no one can be obliged to render healthcare procedures contrary to one’s religious belief, the Court made an exception in life-threatening cases of the mother or the child, because the right to life has preference over the right to religious belief.

Likewise a prolife victory is the unconstitutionality of the provisions (1) giving absolute authority to the spouse who would undergo a procedure and barring the other spouse from participating in the decision, on the ground that it endangers “the marriage and the family, all for the sake of reducing the population” (p.83), and (2) foregoing parental consent for minors who undergo such procedure.

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*****

Business Matters

RH Law has weak foundations

By Bernardo M. Villegas
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Defenders of the Law are frantically shifting to very questionable arguments about reducing teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality. As Nobel Laureate George Akerlof (now referred to as the husband of US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen) demonstrated empirically, the widespread information on and access to contraceptives in the 1960s resulted in the explosion in the number of single mothers and abortions in the United States. Akerlof coined the phrase “contraceptive shock” to refer to this phenomenon.

Proponents of birth control have even less ground to stand on when they try to revive the ghost of Thomas Malthus who, more than 200 years ago, predicted widespread famine because of food shortages. In a recent study of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which appeared in The Financial Times in June 2013, one of the 50 ideas that shaped business today was under the chapter on biotechnology. Together with information technology and material sciences, biotechnology will be one of the defining fields of research in the 21st century. In the subsection titled “High-Yield Agriculture,” the BCG analysts first made a direct reference to the first prophet of doom in economics: “In 1798 Thomas Malthus, the British theorist, postulated that the world’s population would eventually outstrip the planet’s ability to produce sufficient food for all, leading to widespread famine and death.”

Of course, as I learned from the famous economic historians of Harvard, that never happened during the centuries after Malthus. When I was taking my doctorate in the early 1960s, for a short period it seemed that Malthus was right, especially as regards India where increases in grain production did not keep pace with population growth. I remember that the then US ambassador to India, the famous economist John Galbraith who taught our development economics course at Harvard, was busy arranging for food aid for India. Fears of widespread famine were rampant after two droughts in the mid-1960s.

But what is the reality today? Were the pessimists proven right? The BCG report states: “Today, however, India is self-sufficient in food grain. The turnaround is the fruit of the Green Revolution, which brought high-yielding hybrid seeds and other high-tech, intensive farming techniques to millions of small farmers across Asia. The Green Revolution was driven by philanthropic organizations (Rockefeller and Ford Foundations), international agricultural research institutes that developed the new high-yielding seed varieties, and governments that ploughed money into fertilizers, irrigation networks and pesticides.”

We know only too well this phase of Asian economic history. The leading international rice institute was in our very midst in Los Baños, Laguna. Experts from all over Asia, especially the Thais and Vietnamese, came to the Philippines to benefit from the findings of the International Rice Research Institute funded by Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. They returned to their respective countries. Their governments had the wisdom and political will to shower their small farmers with everything needed to help them implement the learning they obtained from the Filipino and other international experts in Los Baños.

Our government under successive administrations did not build the farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, postharvest facilities and other rural infrastructures that were so generously provided to the small farmers by the Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian governments. Result? Our neighboring countries became huge exporters of agricultural products, especially rice.  We continued to suffer from large shortages of all sorts of staple crops. Clearly, the explanation is not the lack of technology or the lack of natural resources. As I have been crying out literally for decades, the culprit is the state’s criminal neglect of rural infrastructures.

Fortunately, since the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the government has done much to focus on countryside development, the major symbol of which is the Philippine nautical highway. The present administration is building on her accomplishments and trying to increase the ratio of infrastructure spending from the very low historical record of 2 percent of GDP to what is the average in the East Asian region—5 percent of GDP.

Who will feed China and other resource-poor nations? Among the best contenders are Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. If we persevere in building more adequate rural infrastructures—both hardware and software—we may join the next group of Southeast Asian countries that will replicate the Thai model of agribusiness development. I am referring to Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia and Laos, all well-endowed with agricultural resources.

There is no question that Southeast Asia, especially after the full integration of the Asean Economic Community, will be a major food belt for China and the other northeast territories of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Together with agribusiness behemoths like the United States, Brazil and Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, not only the Chinese can be fed at high levels of nutrition but also the other food-short regions of the world. With increased research in biotechnology, I am positive that 20 years from now, the food supply for the world will mirror what is already happening to the formerly critical input called petroleum. In the next five years, we shall see an oversupply of energy. One generation later, we shall see an abundance of food.

Bernardo M. Villegas (bernardo.villegas@uap.asia) is senior vice president of the University of Asia and the Pacific.

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