As with any issue, there are those in favor and those opposed to the RH Bill. Unfortunately, while there have been reasonable arguments raised by both sides, these arguments have often been superseded by hysterical outbursts from the parties involved. It also didn't help that the public's attention was further diverted towards Sen. Tito Sotto's plagiarism-ridden speech. The emotionally charged atmosphere and name-calling under which the RH Bill is being discussed makes it difficult to make an informed opinion about this issue.
For the most part, I have been neutral precisely because of the difficulty in analyzing the information that is coming out of the media. Media can be biased in their reporting, and can often get their facts wrong. However, I discovered something in my readings that leads me to raise some concerns about the RH Bill. The previous statement is the last thing that pro-RH Bill people would want to hear, but it's important to explain why I have reservations about the bill.
For the record, I disagree with the CBCP's tactics as well as the logic and statements they are coming out with in order to oppose the RH Bill. Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago says it best when she decried the threats the CBCP made against schools and professors as not only a violation of academic freedom but also as acts reminiscent of Church abuse of authority during the Middle Ages. But despite the clumsy public relations antics of the Church, there really are some issues that need to be clarified about the RH Bill.
It all started when I read an article by Jose C. Sison in The Philippine Star. Mr. Sison is a lawyer who writes an opinion article called A Law Each Day (Keeps Trouble Away) where he features different legal case studies in order to highlight certain aspects of the law. While the concept sounds boring, I occasionally read his articles and find them quite informative. He writes well enough that he gets his point across without peppering the reader with too much legalspeak.
In the particular article in question, Mr. Sison alleges that the RH Bill is being lobbied for and sponsored by foreign agencies such as the UN Fund for Population Development and Assistance (UNFPA), the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (incidentally, according to Sison the latter two organizations are global pro-abortion proponents).
Unfortunately, there is only sparse information about the existence of foreign lobbying for the RH Bill so unless the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism does its homework and tries to uncover any records of foreign sponsorship for the RH Bill, this particular subject will remain a matter of speculation. Something like the Freedom of Information Act of the U.S. would help in uncovering any transactions and communications from foreign lobbyists as they are not likely to want traces of their participation to be so obvious to (or easily traced by) anyone, but unfortunately the FOI Bill is nowhere near to being signed into law.
However, the idea of foreign sponsorship for population control measures is not just a product of idle fancy. The following quote from a Wikipedia article about the RH Bill may serve to shed some light on this matter:
According to the Senate Policy Brief titled Promoting Reproductive Health, the history of reproductive health in the Philippines dates back to 1967 when leaders of 12 countries including the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos signed the Declaration on Population. The Philippines agreed that the population problem be considered as the principal element for long-term economic development. Thus, the Population Commission was created to push for a lower family size norm and provide information and services to lower fertility rates.
Starting 1967, the USAID started shouldering 80% of the total family planning commodities (contraceptives) of the country, which amounted to US$ 3 Million annually. In 1975, the United States adopted as its policy the National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM200). The policy gives "paramount importance" to population control measures and the promotion of contraception among 13 populous countries, including the Philippines to control rapid population growth which they deem to be inimical to the socio-political and economic growth of these countries and to the national interests of the United States, since the "U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad", and these countries can produce destabilizing opposition forces against the United States. It recommends the US leadership to "influence national leaders" and that "improved world-wide support for population-related efforts should be sought through increased emphasis on mass media and other population education and motivation programs by the U.N., USIA, and USAID.
In 2000, the Philippines signed the Millennium Declaration and committed to attain the MDG goals by 2015, including promoting gender equality and health. In 2003, USAID started its phase out of a 33-year-old program by which free contraceptives were given to the country. Aid recipients such as the Philippines faced the challenge to fund its own contraception program. In 2004, the Department of Health introduced the Philippines Contraceptive Self-Reliance Strategy, arranging for the replacement of these donations with domestically provided contraceptives.
In August 2010, the government announced a collaborative work with the USAID in implementing a comprehensive marketing and communications strategy in favor of family planning called "May Plano Ako"
The USAID is not just an ordinary aid organization but is frequently a front for CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) operations in underdeveloped countries. As you can see from the above quote, while foreign participation in advocating population control may not be widely publicized, historically speaking it has always been there behind the scenes. But sovereignty issues aside, so what if there's foreign lobbying for population control measures such as the RH Bill?
I've read the text of the RH Bill and one thing I've noticed is how vague and general several of its provisions are. Because of this vagueness, how the bill's provisions will be implemented are quite open to interpretation. For example, Section 20 (Ideal Family Size) states that:
The State shall assist couples, parents and individuals to achieve their desired family size within the context of responsible parenthood for sustainable development and encourage them to have two children as the ideal family size. Attaining the ideal family size is neither mandatory nor compulsory. No punitive action shall be imposed on parents having more than two children.
One of the questions pertinent to the above section is: how exactly is the State to assist couples, parents and individuals? By what standards are "responsible parenthood" and "sustainable development" measured, and which agency is supposed to certify whether a couple, parent or individual is meeting these standards or not? If achievement of ideal family size is not compulsory nor mandatory, what is the point of measuring "responsible parenthood" and "sustainable development" in planning families?
A possible factor to consider when trying to decide if we should the adopt the RH Bill in its current form is the role of pharmaceutical companies. Should the RH Bill be passed into law, it will create a potentially big windfall for those pharmaceutical companies that produce artificial contraceptives. Of course, the letter of the RH Bill states that both natural and other modes of family planning will be promoted. However, there is a loophole here that can be exploited.
Section 24 (Right to Reproductive Health Care Information) of the RH Bill states that:
The DOH and the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) shall initiate and sustain a heightened and nationwide multimedia campaign to raise the level of public awareness of the protection and promotion of reproductive health and rights including family planning and population and development.
If you will refer again to the quote from Wikipedia, Section 24 of the RH Bill is consistent with the agreement with the USAID to "implement a comprehensive marketing and communications strategy in favor of family planning."
The RH Bill however does not specifically limit the promotion of reproductive health to the DOH or PIA alone. This means that pharmaceutical companies can heavily advertise their contraceptive products and still claim that they are giving their support to the government's campaign to raise awareness about reproductive health (just imagine the advertising byline "So-and-so Company, in cooperation with the DOH, supports responsible family planning and reproductive health"), even if the result of heavy advertising may skew public awareness towards the use of artificial contraceptives.
In the United States, there is an advertising practice among pharmaceutical companies called Direct-to-Consumer drug advertising or DTC. The objective of this strategy is to get consumers so convinced of the drug's efficacy that patients themselves will ask their doctors to prescribe the drug in question. Ever since pharma companies adopted this strategy, drug sales skyrocketed, with a 2008 study estimating that every US$1,000 spent in DTC advertising produces 24 new patients who want to take the drug.
Of course, such "in your face" advertising is not allowed here (that I know of) but the reason I used the United States as an example is because U.S. consumers are supposed to be well-educated and critical yet they are so well taken in by these advertising campaigns. So you can just imagine how easy it would be to advertise to the Filipino masses. If you throw in a showbiz superstar or two to highlight contraceptive marketing campaigns, it's more than likely that the Filipino masses can be convinced that artificial contraceptives should be the preferred way to go.
Generally speaking, pharmaceutical companies spend about a fourth of their income - measured in billions of US Dollars - on advertising and other promotions, so they should be able to come up with many creative ways to make the most of any opening they have to promote their products here in the country. Another market opening can be seen in Section 10 of the RH Bill (Family Planning Supplies as Essential Medicine):
Products and supplies for modern family planning methods shall be part of the National Drug Formulary and the same shall be included in the regular purchase of essential medicines and supplies of all national and local hospitals and other government health units.
The passage of the RH Bill will potentially give a huge opportunity to open up a big market and demand for contraceptives, so it's really a great business opportunity if you happen to produce or sell contraceptives. The government will be required to stock up on contraceptives, and at the same time you can convince people (through advertising) to give preference to contraceptive medicines for family planning.
People may say, so what if some companies make a big buck out of it? Pharmaceutical drugs are rigorously tested before being released into the market, so they're safe for consumption anyway. However, there is an expose by a former U.S. FDA (Food and Drug Administration) insider who stated that the U.S. FDA frequently ignored regulations in approving drugs for sale to the general public even before said drugs have been conclusively proven to be safe for human consumption. This is how prescription drugs result in over 125,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone even when taken correctly as prescribed. You cannot even rely on mainstream media to inform you about incidents involving faulty drugs, such as in this specific case of the Wall Street Journal burying the story of the lawsuit against Merck accusing the pharma company of fraud and lying about the true efficacy of its mumps vaccine.
Such shocking practices as described above are not limited to the U.S. FDA alone. Monsanto, the GMO giant, also has strong lobbying power in Washington so much so that the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) is starting to look like the rubber stamping approval agency of the company. So if you still think that heavy corporate lobbying in government is harmless, think again.
My point is that the above are cases that have happened and are happening in the U.S. If U.S. Federal Agencies could be influenced by big corporate interests, then what more local Philippine agencies?
One may argue that this is all starting to sound like such a big conspiracy theory about corporate greed and sinister motives. Can corporate greed, particularly in the medical industry, really go so far? In order to answer this question, we need to learn how medical doctors keep abreast of the latest developments in terms of medical technologies and new drugs on the market.
Doctors rely on the reports of medical journals to find out if there are new drugs for a specific illness or if there are any new developments on threshold markers that identify one as healthy or not. For example, a blood pressure reading of 120 over 80 is considered normal. But if medical journals suddenly come out and say that based on the most recent studies, a BP reading of 120 over 80 is actually considered hypertensive (high blood), then doctors will use this as basis to start prescribing hypertension medication. That's how much medical doctors rely on these journals. But what if the medical journals themselves were somehow co-opted? This article seems to think that this is the case, and here is the specific quote:
Few doctors are experts in the chemistry and biological impacts of particular medicines, so they rely on honest studies and tests (as reported in credible medical journals) to give them an un-hyped, non-sales-rep picture of the pluses and minuses of the drugs they choose to prescribe to you and me. Unfortunately, this process, too, has been corrupted--drugmakers have regularly paid doctors and researchers to conduct studies and publish results without revealing their financial ties. Pfizer, however, sank this sales-over-science approach to new lows when it launched its antidepressant, Zoloft, in the 1990s. It hired an advertising firm to fabricate "studies," write them up as salutary reports about the drug, pay some big-name psychiatrists a couple of thousand bucks each to put their names on the reports, and convince major journals (read by thousands of doctors) to publish the ghostwritten "findings." About half of the medical articles about Zoloft at that time were ad agency fakes. Journal editors, embarrassed by being scammed, have since imposed safeguards, but many doctors and observers say that up to 20 percent of major journal articles are still being ghosted.
A specific example of how the above trends have impacted medical practice can be found in the following quote from Dr. Mercola's article regarding the truth about high cholesterol:
Who Decided What Cholesterol Levels are Healthy or Harmful?
In 2004, the U.S. government's National Cholesterol Education Program panel advised those at risk for heart disease to attempt to reduce their LDL cholesterol to specific, very low, levels.
Before 2004, a 130-milligram LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy. The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk.
Keep in mind that these extremely low targets often require multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs to achieve.
Fortunately, in 2006 a review in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that there is insufficient evidence to support the target numbers outlined by the panel. The authors of the review were unable to find research providing evidence that achieving a specific LDL target level was important in and of itself, and found that the studies attempting to do so suffered from major flaws.
Several of the scientists who helped develop the guidelines even admitted that the scientific evidence supporting the less-than-70 recommendation was not very strong.
So how did these excessively low cholesterol guidelines come about?
Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the new cholesterol guidelines had been making money from the drug companies that manufacture statin cholesterol-lowering drugs.
The same drugs that the new guidelines suddenly created a huge new market for in the United States.
Coincidence? I think not.
Now, despite the finding that there is absolutely NO evidence to show that lowering your LDL cholesterol to 100 or below is good for you, what do you think the American Heart Association STILL recommends?
Lowering your LDL cholesterol levels to less than 100.
And to make matters worse, the standard recommendation to get to that level almost always includes one or more cholesterol-lowering drugs.
In the same article above, two experts, Sally Fallon (the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation) and Mary Enig, Ph.D (an expert in lipid biochemistry) have been quoted as saying that high cholesterol is an "invented disease." Sounds shocking? Read the full article to get all the gory details.
The point I'm trying to raise is this: as far as corporate interests are concerned, anything goes when the objective is to earn huge amounts of profits.
Some questions that need to be asked (and answered) include: Have any of the sponsors of the RH Bill attended galas or affairs hosted by pharmaceutical companies or USAID? Are any of the principal sponsors of the bill affiliated in any way (either now or in the past) with organizations who may benefit financially by having the RH Bill passed (this includes being a Board of Trustees member, or honorary memberships, etc.)? In the budget allocation breakdown, were any of the funds sourced from contributions by the UNFPA, IPPF or USAID? What is the market impact, in millions or billions of pesos, should the widespread sale and distribution of contraceptives be permitted?
I'm not sure how much of the above information can be gathered without the Freedom of Information Bill, but someone should at least try.
How you achieve a certain ideal is just as important as the ideal itself (just look at communism, great in theory, but epic fail in implementation). We all want the ideal of responsible parenthood and family planning. However, it's easy to take advantage of peoples' desires for a good thing in order to push forward a hidden agenda, primarily by playing on fear and shame. For example, how often have you seen a variation of this slogan: If you do (or don't do) this, so-and-so number of people will die; prevent more people from dying! Vote yes (or no)! This slogan makes it sound like anyone that disagrees with the slogan is an uncultured, immoral brute. This is why accurate perception is always needed so that we don't get easily taken in by propaganda and mass blind beliefs.
I'm not saying that the above scenarios I presented are the actual forces behind the RH Bill. And I'm not saying we should junk the RH Bill. What I am saying is that we should all take a cold, hard and critical look at the effect the bill may have not only on the population but what it means for big business. And blindly jumping on the bandwagon (whether pro or anti) is not the answer. This issue is more than just about labeling pro-RH people as "immoral anti-life ogres" or anti-RH people as "brain-dead Church clones from the Middle Ages." Whether one chooses to be for or against the RH Bill, everyone owes it to themselves to know what they are standing for (or against) and, just as importantly, why.
Only if these concerns are thoroughly addressed can we be reassured that we are not merely passing a law that gives vested interests carte blanche to make billions of pesos worth of profits at the expense of the Filipino people. To be fair, some news reports say that the sponsors of the RH Bill are planning to introduce amendments to address the concerns raised by opponents of the bill, but again such amendments must be carefully scrutinized to make sure that they are not merely cosmetic changes. Any identified loopholes must be addressed effectively.
I've seen a newspaper ad in movie theatres that claims they "Answer the Questions and Question the Answers" but so far I'm not seeing that type of investigative reporting on the RH Bill issue. To quote from Sun Tzu's Art of War, on the subject of Laying Plans:
It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
For the sake of our families and for the sake of our health, someone sure as heck should start on those hard questions.
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