Why the Reproductive Health Bill is an Impoverished Approach to Poverty

At the heart of the resounding call today to approve a proposed legislation allowing mass access to reproductive health is a gross misinterpretation of the Christian humanist obligation to serve the poor and at the same time, a morally, culturally and historically atrophied approach to providing lasting solutions to social dysfunctions. While it is a fact that the problem of population growth is an ethical and moral dilemma that definitely challenges the Christian commitment to the defense of the sanctity of life, the reproductive health bill in its present form thrusts the very question of life from the moral order it is properly situated to theexperimental laboratory of contemporary sociological and economic analysis. By tackling the issue of reproductive health and population management in this light, proponents consequentially reject any standard other than effectiveness and efficiency as guidelines for public deliberation on the matter. Even objectivity is sacrificed under the scalpel of scientific and medical regimes of truth. If not totally banished from the arena of public debates because of their irrationality and appeals to dogmatic principles or exclusivity to a particular sect, the voices of those who uphold tradition, cultural heritage and collectively shared moral values are either challenged to reform or yield to a compromise. This transforms the uniqueness of public deliberation to generate genuine plurality of voices into a banal exercise of preferential bargaining.

What makes the proposal for reproductive health attractive is the way it disguises the contemporary ideology of atomistic individualism and its fetish for self-choice in the form of allusions to human rights, concern for the poverty of the masses and social justice such that even a number of respected well-meaning activists are misled. The problem is not just with the ideology of individualism that is so pervasive today. The problem is also with the kind of thinking that forgets that even though the task of liberation requires the dismantling of social barriers and structures of sin, these structures can never be simply externalized from the very nature of human concupiscence. By diminishing the urgency of this more difficult and demanding task of self-introspection – that is acknowledging one's complicity with the injustices of society not just in a dialectical but in a more organic way – the mechanical manner by which modern social analysis proceeds can now take control of an otherwise faith-informed activism. The structure of sin that needs to be dismantled is not the limits to choice that doctrine and tradition bears upon a community but the relentless pursuit of self-interest and greed normalized and justified by modern capitalism and all forms of thinking that legitimize it and accept it as the last bastion of hope for mankind.

The perversity however of the proposal lies in its claim that providing a right to choose and institutionalizing practices of care already satisfies communal and individual responsibility and as such absolves future interventions and encounters with each other. The result is not a communal drive towards mastering the forces that impact upon human development but rather the extreme idealization of the private self-choice and the alienation of individuals from each other. Tolerance, relativism, and a shallow kind of pluralism become the order of the day. Not anymore the active denouncement of practices that truly hinder the establishment of social justice.

While it is true that the dire state of reproductive and general health care in the Philippines is due to the neoliberal policies adopted by the elitist state and that a mechanism that will provide a relief to the poor who have remained remote from accessible health programs is of course welcome, the justification and glorification of sexual practices that run contrary to acceptable principles of sexual morality further the poverty of the poor and do them more insult than benefit. What the reproductive health will ultimately result to is the further alienation of the rich and the middle class from the poor precisely because an institutionalized form of dealing with the poor is already in place. The real, face-to-face and human encounter with the suffering poor is now replaced by bureaucratic and state functionaries. Simply put, the reproductive health bill will simply legitimize the relativistic attitude of contemporary society to sexual practices and sexual morals idolized not just by the poor but by all sectors of the social stratum. In doing so, poverty extends beyond material impoverishment to spiritual impoverishment to all levels of society.

By working within the very framework of neoliberal policies, the reproductive health bill silences the question of overhauling the fundamental structure of the country's political economy. As such, it is selfish and does not really ask much. A truly radical approach to solving poverty and reproductive problems and women's oppression is a realization that no human emancipatory project can truly deliver the goods and that man will always remain wanting and self-interested. The result of forgetting the fragility of humanity translates to the very acceptance of that selfishness as the fundamental description of human nature and therefore abandons the quest for perfecting the self by the grace of God.

Lastly, the silence of the reproductive health bill on the fundamental wrongs of sexual practices and the secularism of its education component do violence to the sensibilities of the Catholic majority of this country. Its insistence that no religious tradition should be privileged in the deliberation invisibilizes the fact that this very same insistence is an imposition of a tradition itself. Obviously this position does not simply come from a majoritarian insistence. It is an insistence that there is an ultimate Truth from where our lives must be ordered. It is a rejection of the political atomism and religious relativism haunting our communities today.