The Times They Are Not A-Changing

New York—The recent and ongoing controversy over United States federal health-care program that mandates religious-affiliated institutions, such as hospitals, universities, and service agencies, to provide women (and men) access to birth control free of charge through their insurance carriers, has somewhat abated. Churches themselves and other houses of worship are exempt. To defuse the political firestorm emanating, predictably, from Republicans, evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and even from some of his allies (Catholic and non-Catholic), President Obama modified the rule so that those religiously affiliated institutions would not have to shoulder the cost of contraception for their employees; instead, the insurance companies would directly pay for contraceptive coverage–as is the case in the State of Hawai’i, where similarly situated employees get their contraceptives directly through the insurance carriers.

This compromise strikes a balance between the most conservative proponents of religious freedom, and those who favor universal access to birth control. Liberal Catholic groups in the U.S., including Catholic Charities and the Catholic Health Association (representing Catholic hospitals nationwide), have endorsed the modified plan. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, after soon-to-be Cardinal Dolan of New York initially acknowledged that the compromise “was a step in the right direction,” ultimately deemed the solution “unacceptable,” since it presumably still violates the conscience of Catholics and thus impinges on religious freedom.

Closely examined, this tempest is one in a teapot, seized upon by opponents of the administration’s attempts to provide universal health care and close-minded clerics who cannot abide the notion that people, especially women, should have control over their bodies. No one has ever argued that anyone, Catholics included, be forced to purchase contraceptives even when it goes against his or her conscience. And if you happen to be a non-Catholic working for a Catholic university or hospital, and your health insurance is part of the benefits package, this would clearly be an unwelcome imposition of institutional belief on you. Twenty-eight states in fact already offer such services, including New York, where, as The New York Times editorialized recently, this “has been the law … for a decade, without inflicting the slightest blow to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which has complied.” And I may add where it has hardly caused any discernible protest. Besides, surveys consistently indicate that a vast majority of Catholic women use contraceptives at one time or another. This medievalist, authoritarian, and patriarchal decree only further alienates Catholics, tangible proof of how out of touch the institution is with the lives of its flock.

A good friend, who describes himself as a “cafeteria Catholic”–one who picks and chooses those tenets of the Church he agrees with–pointed out in an e-mail that Canadian bishops “do not have as big a beef with their government’s rules on providing contraception.” As always, when it comes to such matters, the Canadians are eminently sensible.

The debate on whether family planning and contraception should be made available to the public is of course a familiar one to Filipinos, and one hopes against hope that our bishops were as sensible as their brethren in Canada. There are some liberal ones in the Philippine church hierarchy but their voices rarely carry weight. At the grass-roots level, many of the nuns and priests who work with the urban poor and who have seen up close the devastating effects of too many mouths to feed, favor family planning. Needless to say, they are marginalized. The dominant official outlook is still that expressed by the late Cardinal Sin who, when asked about the high rate of population growth, remarked that the poor love to have large families. I thought then and still do now that what he said was callous and wrong-headed. Many of the attacks on the proposed Reproductive Health bill before Congress are just as wrong-headed and misinformed, often patently hysterical and ridiculous, i.e., that contraception will lead to promiscuity, and that abortions will increase. Somehow the belief that contraception is abortion continues to persevere, propagated by the more gullible and the malicious. On the contrary, all evidence points to the incontrovertible fact that the availability of contraceptives lessens the incidence of abortions.

That the church and state in the archipelago are separate only in theory but not in practice is manifested in the fact that the RH bill has yet to be passed by Congress. And if passed the bill would only apply to government-run programs, a completely secular realm. Who loses when this health-care feature is not only unavailable but stigmatized? You know the answer as well as I do: The poor, and poor women in particular. Indeed, the meek shall inherit the earth, all six feet of it.

What the priests from their bully pulpits conveniently ignore is that in 2010 Pope Benedict (no flaming liberal, he) stated that the use of condoms can on certain occasions be justified, and the example he cites is that of prostitutes who require their customers to don prophylactics, which the pontiff deems the first step towards being moral. Isn’t ensuring that every family be able to choose how many children it can raise in a humane manner also a necessary step towards moralization?

These men of the cloth (and they are mostly men, presumably celibate) fulminate against the attempts to limit the size of Filipino families even as the population approaches 100 million and even as daily the equivalent of seven airplanes full of simultaneously hopeful and desperate Filipinos seek better lives abroad. I’d like to ask them what they think of the fact that Mary (and Joseph, though the carpenter seemed to have nothing to do with this birth) had apparently only one son. Assuming they led a healthy married life, did the couple then practice some form of birth control? Would they then accuse Mary of being immoral? Surely not. When they then consider the overburdened poverty-stricken Filipina wishing to have a say in the number of children she bears, I suggest they see Mary in her rather than a sinner.

Luis H. Francia @copyright