Reproductive Health as Mastery Learning For Us All

Reproductive health (RH) is almost a two decade old concept which should be understood by all given the amount of passion & politics that seem to overwhelm us now at this juncture of our nationhood. The past days have been witness to heated debates on the Reproductive Health bill in our House of Congress. The women’s movement is very clear on its arguments. 


Still, to recap, we have emphasized that we have moved away from a population control paradigm to a women’s rights perspective: informed choice, women’s health, bodily autonomy, etc. In my college classroom, my students had to master four reproductive rights as already spelled out by women & men & governments all over the world in Cairo, Egypt almost two decades ago: the right to found a family, the right to decide freely & responsibly the number & spacing of one’s children, the right to have access to family planning information & education, & the right to have access to family planning methods & services. These are such benign concepts except that some in the Catholic hierarchy want to define for women how we should practice our faith. As the laity is the majority in the Church, we want our voice to matter as much as the clergy. How we women practice our faith in conflation with our bodies is so important to be left to the male Catholic hierarchy who can never get pregnant, for now, at least, given natural law & current technology. For a bishop to say contraception is corruption so insults the dignity of women who have been using contraception. Academicians were quick to brand this logic as resorting to ‘reduction ad absurdum’ or reducing the argument to the level of absurdity. 


There has been serendipitous good news from the Pope in Vatican which seems to be a breath of fresh air. For the Pope to say that condoms can be morally justified is an iconic change in perspective. The Pope reportedly argued that “using a condom to preserve life & avoid death could be a responsible act – even outside of marriage.” Death here is invoked in reference to prevention from the scourge of the AIDS ailment. In our own country, we have a Fr. Joaquin Bernas, SJ, Jesuit educator & constitutionalist who has communicated a more nuanced stand on the RH bill. He has said that the Philippines is a pluralistic society & that it is wrong to impose one belief system to the rest of the population. In fact, there is an Islamic Official Ruling or Fatwa on Reproductive Health and Family Planning issued by the Assembly of Darul-Ifta of the Philippines in November 2003. By common understanding, a fatwa is a decree made by an Islamic authority. Reading the fatwa, one finds that it is focused on the issue of preventing birth or birth spacing & responsible parenthood. 


According to Emelina Quintillan based on her study, there is, however, very little awareness of the fatwa on family planning. Quintillan notes that according to a survey on the fatwa awareness that was commissioned by the Academy of Educational Development (AED), only 28% of the adult population was aware of the fatwa on family planning in the surveyed areas of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Over the weekend, I ran into Marxists academicians in social media who as expected argue that population is not a problem. This view maintains that what is required is more budget for classroom, for education, for food, etc. From the women’s perspective, we agree. Have we not moved away from the population control perspective? 


I would also like to give a voice to another perspective from Mucha Q. Arquiza, a Muslim thought leader in Mindanao who said, “As Muslim families, I hope we look beyond this controversial law-making & really stare the issue in the eye. No, I do not agree that our children & poor families should be used as the bargaining horses, if not the very stakes burned to stave off poverty or to argue for government priority in development, after all, granting we have all laws in place, we Muslims in the South still have to wrestle with those in Imperial Manila to deliver the crumbs home.” 


Such is a constant struggle that we must address even after the Reproductive Health bill is passed, as it will be. As we say in the women’s movement, work is never done. When the reproductive health bill becomes a law, it will be just a step to a million steps in our journey to our development as a nation.