Iloilo City, Philippines - THE Catholic Church should be more aggressive in its campaign against the use of contraceptives, said Batangas Representative Hermilando Mandañas, a pro-life legislator who visited Iloilo City Thursday.
"A recent survey showed that majority of Filipinos accept the artificial birth control methods and this shows the church is not demanding enough," the congressman said in a press conference hosted by the Iloilo Business Club at the Hotel del Rio.
"This is an issue that concerns society. So the church should actively disseminate information about the issues of morality. Our moral structure is the basic framework of our social and civil structures. We should not put people to a location of sin. That is why the church should help ascertain that we have leaders with moral values. After all, it has been the church that has protected civilizations for a long, long time," he added.
Mandañas, who was among the speakers during Thursday afternoon's pro-life rally at the Freedom Grandstand, said he is glad the church has organized such exercise in Iloilo City.
About 2,000 lay leaders, parishioners and students attended the prayer rally.
They carried placards and streamers, which read, among others, "No to Anti-Life, Depopulation, "No to House Bill 3773," and "Defend Life and Family: No to Ligtas Buntis. No to House Bill 3773."
The rally was capped by a mass officiated by Jaro Archbishop Angel Lagdameo.
Pro-Filipino
"We are also pro-Filipino because our faith is already part of our culture and traditional values, and this is being attacked by foreign ideas," he said the solon, who is against the Ligtas Buntis Campaign (LBC) and the House Bill 3773 or "Responsible Parenthood and Population Management Act of 2005."
"Although this bill is not in favor of abortion, it leads to an occasion that goes against our faith. If that is so, then it is leveled as the same category as abortion," he said.
Mandañas said the human body is the best example of the ecology of life. "If you introduce something artificial to it to prevent something that is natural, you destroy it. Contraceptives are a drastic and brutal attack on the human body."
Lies
Dr. Ligaya Acosta, former information officer of the Department of Health (DOH) 8, said during the press conference the DOH "failed to tell the people the truth."
"For a long time, we have been told that contraceptives prevent conception. There, it became very clear to me that IUDs (intra-uterine devices) work essentially as an abortifacient - it does not prevent conception, but it causes constant inflammation and infection in the uterus thus, the newly-conceived baby, cannot implant in that kind of environment," she said.
Acosta, who also spoke during the rally, said she also found that contraceptives were being promoted as "a condition for receiving foreign aid, which tends to quiet the objections," as Jacqueline Kasun, an American Economist says in her book The War Against Population.
She also quoted Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute based in the U.S., who said in his article, "Protecting the Culture of Life in the Philippines" published in Laywitness (January-February 2004 issue) "(t)he Philippines was one of a dozen countries named in a secret 1974 U.S. National Security Council Memorandum (NSSM 200) which made population control a weapon in the Cold War."
Acosta said contraceptives are a billion-dollar industry in the West and that the Philippines has been a human laboratory for population control since 1973.
Not overpopulated
"The Philippines is not overpopulated and will never be. If we have 111 million Filipinos by 2025 as predicted, there will only be a density of 373 persons per square kilometer.
Do you know that Singapore has a density of 7,000 persons, yet they are a rich country? When you take a plane and look at our land mass, you can see that only a few areas are inhabited," she said.
"It's never an issue of population. We have poverty because we don't have enough for the people which is a result of graft and corruption," said Mandañas.
Acosta revealed she and some Catholic lawyers are now working on a case against the DOH.
The class suit will be based on the ailments reported by the users of contraceptives.
She said that there were testimonies of death (particularly due to pills and IUDs), ailments like high blood pressure, ovarian cysts and cancers due to pills, pelvic inflammatory diseases and infections brought about by IUDs; and couples are drawn apart by contraceptives and sterilization because of depression and reduction in libido.
Some women, she said, who wanted to have babies later on, could no longer have them because their reproductive organ has been destroyed.
"I'm asking the couples to come out in the open so we could include their complaints in the case that we are going to file," she said.
Also present during the press conference were Fr. Ramon Pet, head of the Archdiocese Commission of Family and Life; Mayor Adolf Jaen of Leganes; Antonio Jon, chairman of the Iloilo Business Club; and Lea Lara, executive director of the Iloilo Business Club.