Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae "On the Regulation of Birth" in 1968

A few days ago the CBCP issued a statement exhorting the proposed bills on sex education and reproductive health, saying that “the foundation of the moral society is a central religious truth” and that “to disregard moral and religious truths…is to be defenseless to the onslaught of corruption.”

At first I thought about refuting those claims by challenging the following:

1. the credibility of the CBCP as guardian of morality considering the scandals within the clergy’s own ranks
2. the unspoken assumption that the pope from whom the church gets its dogma is a true recipient and infallible interpreter of divine revelation
3. the unspoken assumption that their particular brand of deity/Lawgiver exists

But then I realized that others have already done that so I moved on to another part of the CBCP statement and found the following assertions:

a. The failures (sic) rates of contraceptives against sexually transmitted diseases are high.

b. Oral contraceptive pills are classified as Group I carcinogenic, i.e., “there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity.”

c. With its very liberal sex education programs and its aggressive attitude in pushing contraceptives and condoms for safe sex, the United States still has the highest teen birth rate, 93.0 per 1000, and one of the highest rates of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) among teens in the industrialized world.

Again I considered countering these assertions or at least putting them into proper perspective but I figured that my fellow freethinkers could do a better job and so I started a thread in the FF forum and I am very greatful for their insights.

The debate on contraception has become convoluted with all these talks of morality, STDs, and poverty that we’ve digressed from the real issue: More than 40 years ago a pope wrote in an encyclical deemed infallible that ‎”an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will.”

Now unless someone comes up with a sophisticated interpretation, I guess the bottom line here is that sex must be kept open for procreation. Lest we muddle the issue with arguments on contraceptive pills that have an abortifacient effect no matter how improbable, let us narrow it down by using condoms as a concrete example, particularly the use of condoms between married couples versus natural family planning. Since the CBCP condemns the former but approves the latter, one is compelled to ask if it isn’t against Humanae Vitae to have sex during the wife’s infertile period considering they are using this “divine gift while depriving it…of its meaning and purpose”. I couldn’t have said it better than fellow freethinker Igme:

What is the difference between ejaculating sperm in latex and ejaculating it in a uterus in its monthly off switch? The intent is the same!

In both cases, the intent is to enjoy the divine gift of sex while depriving it of its procreational purpose. Again, it would be interesting to hear those elaborate arguments that would tell me I’m interpreting Humanae Vitae literally (and incorrectly), because it seems that those statements about condoms being ineffective in preventing the spread of STDs and contraceptives promoting immorality are all just rationalizations to protect the claim that a pope is infallible once he speaks ex-cathedra, which was the case when he wrote the encyclical.

Once we strip off these rationalizations, the real issue becomes clear. Condoms vs. rhythm. Both make sex possible while denying God’s procreational design. So why ban the former but not the latter? I think the answer on condoms is simple: it’s forbidden in Humanae Vitae. However, I’m not so sure why the Church allows rhythm, but I hope my assumption is wrong that they’re simply concerned they might start losing followers once they took away too much of a married couple’s carnal pleasures.

Hello, and welcome to another segment of the Filipino Freethinkers’ weekly news updates! It has been a very busy week on the net, compounded by a mix of some truly interesting, and truly depressing news.

The tech geeks among you will probably have heard of the prototype touch pad that has been unveiled in India recently. At just $35 dollars, it’s definitely going to be a serious competitor for the likes of the iPad. Its inventors explained that the device was intended to be used for the education market, so if Dick Gordon’s still serious about using the Kindle for classrooms, you might want to give him a ring.

In other good news, we also have historian Ambeth Ocampo’s ongoing series of talks over at the Ayala Museum. The second talk just concluded this Saturday, but you can still catch up for his August and September lectures.

There’s also the matter of Phil Plait’s upcoming show on Discovery Channel, Bad Universe. I have no details yet, but based on the trailer that was recently taken down by youtube (Booo!), it will cover some of the more prominent theories on how the universe can destroy earth (killer asteroids, alien invasions, etc.) Doubly awesome is that the format will use copious amounts of Mythbusters-style explosions.

As for the bad news, Desmond Tutu has recently announced his plans for retirement. I’m not a very big fan of religion, as many of you know, but I have come to respect Tutu for his progressive thinking and tolerance. It saddens me that he is stepping down at a time when the religious community need people like him the most.

There was also the matter of the three near-simultaneous earthquakes that recently rocked Southern Philippines, and the passing of pinoy comedian Redford White. In any case, just click on the links below for more details, and be sure to visit the News Thread at the forums for further updates.

Oh yeah, and before I forget: Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty is launching this July 27.

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Friendly Atheist interviews Burn-a-Koran-Day founder (via The Friendly Atheist) Link

Desmond Tutu announces retirement (via The Daily Beast) Link

How to Convert an Atheist (via Greta Christina’s blog) Link

Three intensity 7 earthquakes rock Philippines, Moleman wanted for questioning (via The Hindu Business Line) Link

WBC trolls San Diego Comi-Con. Where’s your Batman now? (via Comics Alliance) Link

India’s $35 iPad contender (via BBC) Link

New Discovery Channel show: Bad Universe (via Discover Magazine) Link

How Sexism Hurts Men (via The Blowfish Blog) Part 1 Link, Part 2 Link

Ambeth Ocampo does Ayala (via The Philippine Star) Link

R.I.P., Redford White (via Yahoo News) Link

I was reading through Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae on the Regulation of Birth when I saw the following passage:

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

At first glance that may look like it actually makes sense, but let us try to break it down and tear it apart.

1. “Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law.”

The key issue here is the term ‘moral law’, which unfortunately does not have a very definite definition:

Moral law is a system of guidelines for behavior. These guidelines may or may not be part of a religion, codified in written form, or legally enforceable. For some people moral law is synonymous with the commands of a divine being. For others, moral law is a set of universal rules that should apply to everyone.

Obviously the Church focuses on the “moral law is synonymous with the commands of a divine being” part, insisting not only that they are the sole recipient and interpreter of divine ‘revelation’, but that they actually hold the patent for morality. But what gives them the right to do so? Their claims are all hearsay and circular. And look at how their own ranks fared in terms of morality. Once the light of reason shines on the perceived moral authority of the Church, the things they so strongly denounce – contraceptives and free sex – become a matter of personal choice for the individual. Some may make less responsible choices than others, but the basis for what will be deemed ‘responsible’ is the careful collective reflection of an evolving society and not the absolute word of self-proclaimed leaders.

2. “Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman…”

Does wearing a condom mean that one has forgotten the reverence due to a woman? On the contrary, it shows the respect and care to the woman’s health and preferred reproductive status – even at the cost of reduced pleasure.

3. “…and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires…”

I think the women are more equipped to answer this. Does the Church really think that women are robots without their own sexual desires? Just like men, they too need to satisfy these desires every now and then to maintain emotional equilibrium. That’s what they mean when they tell someone acting bitchy that she needs to get laid.

4. “…no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

Is the mutual act of constantly satisfying each other’s sexual needs not a manifestation of care and affection between partners? And how can you surround her with care and affection if you need to avoid getting horny during the woman’s fertile period? When the wife is cooking his favorite dish, the husband will now hesitate to give her an affectionate hug from behind as an expression of gratefulness for the meal, because certain body parts might brush against each other and lead them to conceive another child – or break ‘moral law’ by using contraception.

In a diverse and evolving society, an absolute standard of morality simply doesn’t work. First, no matter how the Church claims that their laws were ‘revealed’ by God, this is actually hearsay and might as well be concocted by fallible men for their own agenda. Second, implementation is impossible to large populations, as even the leaders themselves bungle up.

Interestingly, we can observe another organizational approach from nature. Here is a passage from Michael Crichton’s novel Prey that explains how large numbers of the lower animals effectively achieve order and harmony without leaders telling them what to do:

Human beings expected to find a central command in any organization. States had governments. Corporations had CEOs. Schools had principals. Armies had generals. Human beings tended to believe that without central command, chaos would overwhelm the organization and nothing significant could be accomplished. From this standpoint, it was difficult to believe that extremely stupid creatures with brains smaller than pinheads were capable of construction projects more complicated than any human project. But in fact, they were.

African termites were a classic example. These insects made earthen castlelike mounds a hundred feet in diameter and thrusting spires twenty feet into the air. To appreciate their accomplishment, you had to imagine that if termites were the size of people, these mounds would be skyscrapers one mile high and five miles in diameter. And like a skyscraper, the termite mound had an intricate internal architecture to provide fresh air, remove excess CO2 and heat, and so on. Inside the structure were gardens to grow food, residences for royalty, and living space for as many as two million termites. No two mounds were exactly the same; each was individually constructed to suit the requirements and advantages of a particular site. All this was accomplished with no architect, no foreman, no central authority. Nor was a blueprint for construction encoded in the termite genes. Instead these huge creations were the result of relatively simple rules that the individual termites followed in relation to one another. (Rules like, “If you smell that another termite has been here, put a dirt pellet on this spot.”) Yet the outcome was arguably more complex than any human creation.

Most people watching a flock of birds or a school of fish assumed there was a leader, and that all the other animals followed the leader. That was because human beings, like most social mammals, had group leaders. But birds and fish had no leaders. Their groups weren’t organized that way. Careful study of flocking behavior—frame-by-frame video analysis—showed that, in fact, there was no leader. Birds and fish responded to a few simple stimuli among themselves, and the result was coordinated behavior. But nobody was controlling it. Nobody was leading it. Nobody was directing it. Nor were individual birds genetically programmed for flocking behavior. Flocking was not hard-wired. There was nothing in the bird brain that said, “When thus-and-such happens, start flocking.” On the contrary, flocking simply emerged within the group as a result of much simpler, low-level rules. Rules like, “Stay close to the birds nearest you, but don’t bump into them.” From those rules, the entire group flocked in smooth coordination.

A flock of birds with a population of thousands will move as if it were a single organism, with virtually no collision between birds. Now imagine if there was a single leader, a dozen generals, and a few hundred lieutenants all chirping out orders on how fast to fly and what direction to take. Even if these birds were equipped with GPS and radios to track and communicate with the individual members, such attempts at centralized command will only result in a fatal breakup of the formation.

As for morality, look at where the attempts at establishing an absolute moral standard have brought us. Overpopulation and poverty are an inescapable reality, and so is the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. All because of a letter deemed absolute and infallible, written by a pope more than four decades ago. And I guess this leads us to ask: Should there be an absolute moral standard, and should moral authority be centralized?

A behavior one can observe is how the Anti-RHB groups have actually attempted to dehumanize their opponents. One can easily see it in the headlines as Bishops accuse Pro-RH people of immorality in public online discussions. The readiness of the Anti-RHB to never understand a side that understands them all too well is apparent. It flies in the face of common sense when the Anti-RHB assume that these former Catholics or Christians or Pro-RH Christians do not understand their faith. Opposition having come from their own ranks, it never occurs to them that they already know or that they did not understand the teachings enough. This arrogant and distorted view has led to many clashes and polarized the discussion.

It does not help that the Anti-RHB people do not even provide adequate scientific backing to their arguments. Practically all of these arguments, and I’m not generalizing, are very poorly constructed. Most of the time there are no links or sources cited. Most of the arguments are anecdotal and follow poor logic, falling into logical fallacies like argumentum vericundum, negative premise, fallacy of illicit process, and a lot of self-reliant fallacies. One of the “strongest” evidences posted fail miserably in the fact checking. As an example, look at the  medical primer for the RHB by Dr. Angelita Miguel-Aguirre.

Fallacy of illicit process: Julian Simmons and Professor Gary Becke talk about overpopulation with respect to WORLD capacity, not the nation’s economic capacity. Their books and abstractions can be found in this link . It would be only fair for their views to be clarified if they really pertain to allowing families to grow sustainably in an emerging and poor market like the Philippines, especially since the Nobel prize they were awarded dealt with an entirely separate issue from Reproductive Health.

Quote-mining and fallacy of illicit process: regarding Edward C. Green’s research on the condom use in Uganda.

Obsolete and Debunked Studies: Barbara Seaman: the Pill and I 40 Years on the Relationship and the latest technology regarding contraceptive pills.

Because they have wasted people’s time with really poor and invalid evidence and continue to provoke and harass the Pro-RHB people, the credibility of such people have come to a point that they are no longer seen as worthy of proper attention or respect. Wasting people’s time, provoking them,  continuously giving the same poorly constructed arguments, and ignoring well constructed counter-arguments are actions that can only be interpreted negatively.

What is compounding the damage is the language that assumes that their opponents don’t understand anything Christian, theological, moral or ethical, that these people who are of their same faith know nothing about these things and that only they are the sole source of authority to be worth listening to.

As their actions have crossed the line to many of the Pro-RHB people and pointed out with the negative language that best describes those that act in that method, a vicious cycle is created. Their ability to selectively choose information, also known as confirmation bias, makes them think their provocation is justified and they continue to pursue a strategy of repetition. The very repetition is already a symptom of severe mental tunnel vision, being unable to act dynamically to the individual circumstances of a given situation. Cut off from rationality, they will continue to repeat this strategy until they grow tired of having severely damaged all credibility of their cause for lack of a more diplomatic solution.

It’s sad reading all this debate between the CBCP and Secretary Cabral on this issue of free condom distribution. Personally, I believe that contraceptives should not be given freely. The secretary is better off distributing free medicines rather than focusing on free contraceptives. There are those who are in dire need of medicines these days.

It is a fact that contraceptives help control booming population and STDs, and foreign financial aids pour into the country supporting initiatives to stop AIDS and overpopulation. However this does not mean that we should take the opportunity to distribute contraceptives freely. That would be helpful for some people but there are those whose sense of morality is stuck in the middle ages who will feel that this act is a violation their moral fiber.

It would be better to give subsidies than contraceptives and appropriate proper education and regulation methods. Contraceptives should be requested and not distributed freely given the available finances. If these contraceptives are duly subscribed and approved by the local health center, paid by the educated user and subsidized by the government, we can have a sense of assurance that the people who will use it have a sense of commitment and ownership. However, if contraceptives are given freely, we cannot be sure whether these contraceptives will be used properly, sold to a third party, or used as water balloons in the next wet ‘n’ wild party. Proper education and regulation should be the first step, not immediate distribution. Or else… the very eager and voracious cookie monster will do the job of educating for the government.

Kidding aside, it is true that the country needs to resolve overpopulation through the use of contraceptives. But, as a wise woman said during one FF convention: “It is not enough that we know that truth. We should hear that truth from the voices of our people.” They should be the ones asking and voicing out their need – not Secretary Cabral, not the CBCP.

And besides, we don’t want spend foreign aid and the tax payers money for the next wet ‘n wild party do we?

This is my second corroborative effort with Wesley (the first was What Makes Us Special). My words are the ones in normal type while Wesley’s are in italics.

* * * * *

Sex feels good and it stimulates the entire body. Muscles tighten and heart rate rises along with blood pressure, respiration and body temperature. The brain becomes flooded with dopamine, the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter. Finally, a feeling of oneness with the universe (or at least with the partner) washes over, clearing the mind. Sex is not just a physical and physiological experience but also a psychological and even spiritual one – and maybe that’s why some people shout “Oh, my God” during orgasm.

And what exactly is an orgasm, in technical terms? Dr. Prakash Kothari defines it as: “an explosive, cerebrally-encoded neuromuscular response at the peak of sexual arousal elicited by psychobiological stimuli, the pleasurable sensations of which are experienced in association with dispensable pelvic physiological concomitants.”

It appears that our body’s pleasurable response towards sex is encoded in our brains. Sex is therefore Darwinian; evolution made sex feel good because otherwise we would not be engaging in it considering the hardships and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth – dooming the fate of the species. In short, evolution made sex feel good because it is crucial to survival of the species. 

As such, animals (and our prehistoric ancestors) start courtship and mating as soon as they become fertile because in the wild it’s a daily struggle between eating and trying not to get eaten, so it makes no sense waiting a few more years for adulthood before giving your contribution to the gene pool. In the wild, the animals mate at will but nature controls their population.

Now the problem starts when a certain species’ survival becomes too successful – when it has climbed to the top of the food chain because it has overpowered all of its known predators – to the point of overpopulation. I remember a part from The Matrix where Agent Smith asserts that humans are not mammals because mammals reproduce in accordance with the available food and water in the area. Humans, on the other hand, reproduce uncontrollably, exhausting resources and destroying ecosystems, and then move on to other places, repeating the process. And there is another organism that does just that: the virus.

Our species’ intellectual capacity and unique ability to shape our environment to such a high degree has earned us the enviable top perch in the natural order. We have virtually eliminated all threats to our survival of the predatory nature. We have driven some of nature’s best killing machines, the great beasts themselves, into near-extinction, surviving now only in zoos and nature preserves, existing now only at the mercy of man. The only other creatures left to prey on us are a few handful parasitic bugs and microbes, and even those we’ve developed effective drugs to rid our system of them. In short, we have become a species without a means of regulating ourselves. We have used our intellectual abilities to bypass nature’s checks and balances and now breed ourselves to oblivion.

Take for example the micro-ecosystem of an aquarium. A poorly designed and maintained aquarium seldom lasts long. The fishes may have been left to multiply beyond the capacity of the limited space or maybe the algae grew all over the place… either way, if the delicate balance of the ecosystem was upset due to uncontrolled, rampant growth, it soon finds its oxygen-nitrogen balance gone awry. It’s a concept every elementary student learns in science class. In an imbalanced environment, things will soon start dying out if there’s too much or too little of the required plants and animals to maintain the carbon cycle.

The earth is like a giant aquarium. Already we see the effects on the water supply, the climate, air quality, and over-all health of the species population suffering because of the scale in which man has tampered with the environment. But we have to use up the available resources to fuel our ever-rising population. It’s simple math, the more people there are in the world, the more forests we have to cut down to make our houses, and the more animals we have to kill for food. Our resource-renewal efforts haven’t quite matched the pace in which we use them up. Deniers may claim that climate change may not be due to man’s effects on the environment, or that we still have enough resources in the world to last for a few more hundred years, but one cannot deny that the world is now a dirtier place than it was a decade ago. 

The Bible passage “go forth and multiply” probably did more damage to the environment than the discovery of fossil fuel. And now the Church is telling us that in controlling the disaster this “word of God” has caused the world we must use only ‘natural’ or Church-approved methods. But which is really more unnatural, artificial contraception or abstinence from something already hard-wired into our instincts? The latter totally denies something innate in our nature; the former merely prevents the environmentally-harmful side effects of too much of that nature. The latter is unreasonable and oppressive; the former is responsible.

Somewhere along the way, anything enjoyable became deemed evil by self-appointed moral police. Sure anything in excess is bad for you, but taken in moderation and with proper precautions, this falls in the category of “responsible recreation”. If some people think it improper, then by all means let them abstain from it. But those minority shouldn’t impose their lifestyle choices on the rest of the population. In the bigger scheme of things, which act is more evil? Wearing a condom or having kids you can’t raise?

Sex may lead to pro-creation but the two are still two totally distinct acts, no matter how much some belief systems may insist that they’re one and the same. When you start a fire, you aren’t obligated to go cook something. Sometimes, it’s enough just to enjoy the warmth of a blazing fire on a cold night. The same goes for sex. It’s a social activity and a recreational sport as well. From a liberal point of view, it’s not even that different from a couple going dancing (that’s why it’s also called the horizontal tango).

But somewhere along the way, generations of culture and tradition turned it taboo which left us where we are now – a species that treats sex as something either dirty or sacred (quite the irony there) instead of the natural act that all the other animals in the world seem to take for granted. Which begs the question – have we become too smart for our own good? Have we outsmarted ourselves in the process of winning the genetic race? While we enjoy the enviable luxury of being able to breed without fear of being some other animal’s lunch later, we have ironically become our own worst enemy by inventing ways to limit ourselves.

Sex is sex and procreation is procreation. The former lasts a night, the latter carries with it a responsibility of 18 years minimum taking care of your kid. It should always be the couple’s choice how far they’re willing to go because they’re the ones who are going to take care of the child, not the church, and certainly not those anti-contraceptive campaigners. So how silly is it to make up all these imaginary rules on how couples should have sex? If you plan to have only two kids because as a responsible parent, that’s all you can afford to raise, then there’s the possibility that you might only have sex twice in your whole married life. Try selling that proposition to all the married couples out there and see how far that gets you. 

We don’t need religion to tell us that every baby born into the world is a wellspring of potential. But that’s generally the problem now, is it? So much untapped potential and no way to unlock it because how does a family earning minimum wage get all ten children fed, educated, and raised properly? Most families have no problem with the breeding… but the raising? Most people never even think about it. It’s a matter of quantity or quality, which, more often than not, makes for a poor strategy in trying to uplift one’s condition. The less there is to go around, the less chance of getting out of poverty. In that aquarium metaphor, introducing more fish doesn’t make things better, it’ll just force everyone to compete against each other for scarce resources, and not in a good way, as one can see with the escalating crime rate. In the end, we end up with a lot of people forced to do bad things in order to survive. And no amount of the church’s preachings will stop someone from breaking the law if the alternative is hunger. 

In a religion where natural urges are deemed evil or immoral but having more children than you can raise responsibly is acceptable because it’s “a gift of god”, we end up with an escalating population growth that far surpasses the rate our infrastructure is able to cope with. The number of urban poor is rising exponentially each year, clear proof that the economic and social infrastructure development cannot match our population rise.

Yet there are still sectors of society who blindly claim that we are “not overpopulated”, that we have more space to grow. Space is not the issue here, it’s the problem of turning everyone into productive members of society. A typical family belonging to the urban poor will churn out a dozen babies without an inkling how to provide not only food and shelter for their brood, but how to turn them into productive adults. So they grow up into uneducated, unskilled vagrants that further tax our already over-burdened urban infrastructure. It’s a vicious cycle of uncontrolled growth.

Yes, it’s not the headcount per-se that determines whether we’re over-populated or not, rather how well resources are channeled to each individual. There are first-world countries that have denser urban populations than us but the big difference is that a greater percentage of their population are productive, able to work within the economy to provide for themselves instead of resorting to crime or waiting for charitable dole-outs.

Population growth should always follow the economic trends, not the other way around. If there are too many people and too few jobs to go around, we hit an economic crunch. It’s simple supply-and-demand : if you’ve got an over-supply of unemployed workers, their market values plummet. Employers can pay sub-standard wages because everyone is desperate to get any sort of work. With that level of salary, you end up living from paycheck to paycheck, unable to get out of the poverty cycle.

Let me make this clear: this is not about limiting how many children you’re allowed to have, it’s about responsible parenthood. If you can’t provide for your future offspring, then you should think twice about bringing them into the world. It’s your decision and your actions but it’s the children who will suffer for it. Children are not lottery tickets that you get as many as you can get your hands on, hoping that by playing the numbers game, one of them might eventually be your ticket out of poverty. Instead, that rare child who grew up in the slums that beats the odds of finishing school and gets a good job still ends up with the problem of having to support his parents and a dozen other unemployed siblings that didn’t fare as well.

In the wild, the weak do not live long enough to slow down the rest of the species; they either get eaten by predators or die from starvation because they cannot effectively hunt for survival. But we do not live in the wild, and we generally do not leave our offspring and other family members to fend for themselves. And since we are well above this law of the jungle that keeps populations in equilibrium with the available resources, the least we could do is to regulate our propagation so as not to overburden our already ailing planet. Now which is the more reasonable way of doing that, abstinence or contraception? Come to think of it, abstinence is prescribed by the same people who insist that we “go forth and multiply”. And look where that has brought us now.

Another piece by my high school classmate Lenore Laluna

* * * * *

I take birth control pills. So what. I could tell you it’s because it helps to regulate my often haywire menstrual cycle (one time six months without a period – it’s a good thing I’m an extremely good girl and have nothing to worry about). Or that the pills help control acne (I hate that at my age I still get besieged with pimples!). Still the incident the other week: “You’re still taking birth control pills!” my sis exclaimed as she saw the pack in my bag. I felt like I’d just been caught with my hand down the cookie jar. The above reasons I’d cited and said to her, sounded so lame to my ears (nevertheless, both are true by the way!). Because to the contrary, I certainly do not have a swinging sex life (haven’t been kissed for the longest time, let alone…). And it’s not like I jump into bed with any man I fancy (really, I’d much rather prefer to say, I stroll into bed and take my own sweet time). So why do I take these pills which I have to remember to take everyday (no mean feat for someone who’s as absent-minded as me)? I guess it’s about having control over one’s body,  having a choice in the matter.

I guess it’s a no-brainer why women feel more passionately about the reproductive health bill than men. I mean, women can get pregnant. Men can’t. And as trite as Ms. Universe Sushmita Sen’s answer, that the essence of being a woman is to love, and the role that we do as mothers”. Not that I’m supplanting Ms. Universe, but I believe the essence of being a woman also lies in her exercising that right to her own body, and having that choice to bear children or not.

See, I’ve researched the matter quite thoroughly. As compelling as the evidence is, from population experts, about the declining population of certain developed countries and how this will affect the country’s economic future later on. When it comes down to it, no woman tells herself: “I’m going to have kids because the world population is declining”. It boils down to a personal choice – am I ready to bring kids into this world – do I even have the time and patience for them – do I see myself working my ass off for an X number of years till he/she finishes college? I won’t be dissuaded from my convictions with a rational answer, when the very act of procreation entails not reason, but is ruled by one’s passions and bodily desires. So the logical stance just won’t cut it for me.

*UPDATE*: This has been postponed to Dec. 3, 9:45pm to make way for discussions on the Maguindanao massacre.

Tune in to Rocked Radio at NU107 to hear answers to the question:

What is a Rational Hero?

Thursday, Nov. 26 TBA, 9-11pm

Guests:

1. Tania Arpa
2. Mike Aquino
3. Ryan Tani
4. Bob Guerrero of Unitarian Universalist Church
5. Beth Angsioco of Reproductive Health Advocacy Network
6. Carlos Celdran of Rational Hero

Anything you’d like us to discuss? Tune in and call or leave a comment below. Thanks!

Thanks to Carlo Ople, Benj, Tania, and I had an enlightening evening with Rep. Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel. It was enlightening for this skeptic to see that there was still a flicker of hope in our government.

Here is a politician who recognizes the rights of minorities — including freethinkers — respects our secular Constitution, and is not afraid to talk about it — even at the risk of displeasing the CBCP.

We were given a chance to ask her questions and I got to the point: What does she think about the CBCP’s political meddling, especially on the RH Bill? And what can supporters of secularism do to stop Church politicking?

She answers all this and more in the two-part interview above.

Intelligent conversation, delicious food — it was a wonderful evening. Until I read about what the Comelec did to Ang Ladlad. Oh well. Disgusting, I know. At least we know we have one representative who feels the same way.

I was raised a Catholic, and as a child, religion was all about loving my neighbors, singing songs, reciting the prayers and believing in Jesus, so while I was young it was all nice. Later on it became a set of rules I was supposed to abide by — don’t lie, don’t kill, don’t steal — and it made sense still, so it was okay. But then as I grew older it became about sin, about how I was born sinful and how certain sins meant that I was scheduled for an eternity in hell, and the only way out of it was to talk to a priest and eat some wafer. Loving my neighbors had taken a back seat to getting into heaven, but still I bought it anyway. For a while. Read the full story

Dr. Sylvia Estrada-Claudio, who spoke about the Reproductive Health bill at the FFFF, has posted the details of an RH mobilization for the supporters of the said bill:

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