Healthcare as a matter of right

After a year of refuge in Baguio City from the first shock of martial law imposed by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972, our young family decided to leave the mountain retreat and return to the confines of old Manila. Actually, with another child coming, I needed to look for work to support my growing family. Two years later, I would find a job with the Population Centre Foundation, a private organization established to promote and fund family planning programs and research as part of the New Society’s population control initiative. The Foundation was bankrolled by huge grants from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the USAID.

Here it was one late sultry afternoon when the chairperson of the Foundation, the First Lady of the land, Imelda Romualdez-Marcos, made a surprise visit along with her retinue of friends and foreign visitors, among them Van Cliburn, the celebrated American pianist. She wanted to show the new building and its modern facilities to her guests. For the first time, I got up close and personal with the dictator’s better-half, even shaking her soft and silky hands that exuded a fragrance totally foreign to my native nose buds. Mesmerized for some reason, I didn’t wash my hand that night to keep the bouquet as fresh as possible. My right hand was also a bit swollen, almost crushed, when I shook hands with the famous Van Cliburn, whose fingers were so large they could run the full length of two baby grands.

By that time, the Population Commission, the government office in charge of family planning on a national level, was already distributing free condoms, contraceptives and other birth control devices in health centres throughout the country. Their offices were also housed in the Foundation’s new edifice which was part of the tour that I conducted for the heavily-scented First Lady and her guests. The tour ended in the ultramodern kitchen where someone from the group started asking whether there was any food they could nibble before they left. It was fortunate that the canteen concessionaire had a whole apple pie left and the guests, including the wife of the New Society helmsman, digged at it as if they had not eaten for days. Well, the guests loved the lip-smacking apple pie. My boss, the executive director of the Foundation and Madame Imelda’s gynaecologist, took me aside and whispered if I could ask the concessionaire to send another pie to Malacanang Palace where the First Lady and her husband lived. Mrs. Marcos would really appreciate it, he added. His total obeisance jolted me from my bad dream. I quit my job soon after, promising myself not to kowtow again to the infamous occupants of the Palace by the Pasig River, and never to eat an apple pie when our starving people couldn’t even afford to smell or buy a real apple.

More than 35 years have passed and now the country’s Roman Catholic Church is being threatened by a Reproductive Healthcare bill in Congress. For some, it would have been better without such a law since the Catholic Church never protested against family planning and birth control during the Marcoses’ halcyon days. Was it also because the Church lost its voice during the twenty years of iron rule by the Marcoses? Others rue that Church hierarchy waited it out till after the EDSA People Power Revolution drove the Marcos family out of the country. Yes, from all indications, the hierarchy’s reaction was far and between a little bit too late.

Promiscuity, among the young especially, had become permissive. New social values and sexual norms have sprung up and eroded the modesty and temperance of the old generation. The fact is that the Church had slept and almost by default allowed the forces of progress to march onward along with birth control devices. Except for its unflinching stand against abortion, the Church has lost this fight a long time ago.

Truth is, the proposed reproductive healthcare law is not all about birth control as the Church and other opponents of the bill would like to portray it. It only became a family planning issue after President Benigno Aquino III during a recent visit to the United States said that he would extend assistance to couples planning to limit the number of their children by using artificial contraceptives. According to the Church, contraception is a type of abortion and it is a grave crime and banned by the Constitution.

Arguments over the proposed reproductive health law range from whether population control will actually alleviate poverty or whether the law is moral or immoral. Oftentimes, our leaders and policy makers blame overpopulation as the root cause of poverty. That kind of argument goes far back to the Middle Ages which echoed the plaint raised by an Italian priest and diplomat by the name of Giovanni Botero, who said that population cannot increase beyond its food supply.

There are other countries and cities in the world which are much more crowded than Manila or the entire country, yet they have a higher gross domestic product per capita. Accepting that a manageable population of healthy, educated and productive citizens is key to sustainable human development, population control is not an assurance of genuine development.

Poverty in the Philippines is not caused by overpopulation but by farmers’ problems of landlessness, workers’ lack of jobs and low wages, and government policies that favour big business interests over people’s welfare. An inequitable concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 10 per cent of the population also reinforces widespread poverty.

Any effective reproductive healthcare law must address issues beyond population control—not just about the use of pills, injectibles, condoms and cycle beads. It must focus on making reproductive healthcare services accessible to all women, particularly indigent and poor women workers who have long been excluded from healthcare. It’s the woman’s health, stupid, to borrow from James Carville’s famous epithet.

The poor, particularly women, have always been at the losing end of this debate about population control. Take abortion on demand, for example. Criminalizing abortion has forced pregnant women who do not want to give birth to seek clandestine options. A recent study made by the New York-based Centre for Reproductive Rights found that over half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unintended and one-third of these pregnancies end in abortion. The same report also said that because of various reasons including rape and dire socio-economic consequences, half a million Filipino women are choosing abortion with more than 1,000 women dying and 90,000 being hospitalized for complications from unsafe abortion.

Making abortion illegal does not stop abortion; it only makes it more dangerous for the health and lives of Filipino women. The Philippines, which owes its Roman Catholic faith to Spain, makes abortion criminal by lifting directly from the old Spanish Penal Code of 1870. Because of high rates of death from unsafe abortion due to its illegality, Spain has already reconsidered its restrictive law and, since 1985, has allowed abortion on certain grounds. In February 2010, Spain went even further in liberalizing abortion by allowing the procedure without restrictions up to 14 weeks and by giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to have abortions without parental consent.

Other predominantly Catholic countries like Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Colombia, Mexico and Portugal have all also allowed abortion on certain grounds.

Whether to allow women to abort is a hot issue that will linger, perhaps even forever. Those who believe in the sanctity of human life in accordance with the teachings of their religion will never be deterred in championing the pro-life cause. Pro-choice activists will do the same. Bridging this great divide will require a rational understanding of social evidence that more and more women today die from unsafe abortions. In the end, the real issue is whether we should deny healthcare as a matter of right to these unfortunate women.

Public shaming – does it work?

The allegations that the present Pope knew about the sex abuses committed by some members of the Roman Catholic clergy and didn’t do anything about them have created a sense of outrage and moral panic among Catholic believers. It does not give the Church any consolation by continuing to choose between protecting the victims of sex abuse and protecting the Church. In the end, there is only one moral and sensible choice here: to protect both the victims and the Church.

Covering up sexual abuses by the clergy and paying off the victims and their families with hush money will not make the problem go away. Or even prosecuting the offending priests in the courts of law. The Church needs to rethink beyond the issues of crime and punishment, and implement a whole new approach, even if this requires some radical changes in church doctrine and practice.

But what is more distressing than this Church scandal or say, the Tiger Woods’ liaisons with a number of women outside his marriage, is the carnival-like attitude of society to hang in public those who have lost control of their erectile impulses. History is replete with men in high offices who were known for consorting with women other than their wives and nobody in that list was required to make a public admission of his sin. It took an evangelical and good old Christian Jimmy Carter to admit he had looked on a lot of women with lust. During an interview with Playboy, President Carter said, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

This is not to say that it’s ethical and moral, save for the members of the clergy, to allow men to enjoy the company and comfort of women as if they were fruits of victory. As a public act of contrition, perhaps Jimmy Carter best summed up for all men about how difficult it was to struggle evading the snares laid by the Devil.

My point here is why we do not demand such humiliating public show of remorse from men who have done worse. Like George Bush, for his criminal invasion of Iraq. Or, Tony Blair for his collusion with Bush in an illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003. Many learned and independent scholars of international law have accused both men of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Regardless of the issue of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, Blair admitted to the BBC and the Chilcot Inquiry that he would have gone to topple Saddam Hussein anyway.

Spain’s celebrated judge Baltazar Garzon, who indicted former Chilean dictator and president Augusto Pinochet, has called for Bush, Blair and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Garzon has condemned Iraq’s invasion as “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history.”

How about Wall Street banks for looting their clients, their deposits and the U.S. Treasury? The U.S. government bailed out Wall Street by pumping stimulus money to their coffers, money that was eventually used by these financial institutions to pay bonuses to their managers who were responsible for the economic crisis.

What took it so long for the Securities and Exchange Commission to sue Goldman Sachs? As everyone now knows, the SEC has charged the giant Wall street firm with deliberately misleading investors who participated in mortgage securities trade that was designed to fail.

Or how about chemical companies for poisoning our air and water? Or, pharmaceutical companies for the distribution of drugs inducing the diseases they supposedly prevent?

Perhaps, as human beings, it is easier for us to recycle gossips than to gather the facts. We would rather relish the public hanging of the Pope or Tiger Woods than suffer boredom and monotony in appreciating the clarity of the arguments for the prosecution of Bush and Blair for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. Instead of accepting women as subjects rather than objects the way they are treated in the tabloid press, we salivate in the manner they are regarded like exotic spoils for the victorious and the mighty.

No wonder our society appears upside down.

One of Latin America’s distinguished writers, Eduardo Galeano, wrote:

“The upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples, and feeds cannibalism. Its professors slander nature: injustice, they say, is a law of nature. Milton Friedman teaches as about the ‘natural rate of unemployment.’ Studying Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, we learn that blacks remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder by ‘natural’ law. From John D. Rockefeller’s lectures, we know his success was due to the fact that ‘nature’ rewards the fittest and punishes the useless: more than a century later, the owners of the world continue to believe Charles Darwin wrote his books in their honour.”

The golfing gods have a reason to smile during the recent Masters golf tournament. Tiger was back and is still the king of his sport, despite finishing fourth, a difficult feat considering his absence from competition for quite some time. What really matters to the organizers is that the ratings are higher.

What does Tiger’s public shaming say about us?

To some it would seem refreshing that something as simple as shame could drive the world’s greatest athlete into hiding. Tiger Woods was embarrassed by his behaviour off the golf course, and entering a counselling program didn’t make him a changed man. Only time and how many more majors Tiger finally wins will tell if his public shaming turned out into a good thing.

At a time when many cultural critics have started to pillory America as a modern-day Rome decaying into moral rot, shame has claimed many other big names in American politics recently. Former Senator John Edwards, once a Democratic vice-presidential nominee, was run out of politics by cheating on his wife. Same with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford who fell from grace after his affair was exposed. And there’s former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and Idaho Senator Larry Craig, both shamed out of office.

Is it any solace to us that the concept of shame still matters? Yet, we don’t apply shame’s sharp edge on high crimes and public misdemeanours, such as those committed by leaders of states. Nor are we ever close to taking penance for the predatory nature of capitalist greed that is exemplified by Wall Street.

Public shaming may matter but only in a transitory sense. As a society, we easily forget the trespasses of those we look up to, like superstar athletes or big celebrities. It is also the Church’s tradition of forgiveness that has led itself in sheltering its errant priests through the promise of effective therapy and treatment, and later to reassignment to other parishes. Unfortunately, this often resulted in a whole new group of victims being abused.