Against Ligtas Buntis: A Catholic Church stand that needs critical rethinking

Blogger's Note: Once in a while you find articles like this to remind us that no matter how far we advanced in terms of technology and standards of living, there are things in life that tie us down. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. There are positions of the Catholic Church that I do admire and follow. But in terms of pregnancy and natal care, they are somewhat backward. I sometimes wonder if church leaders understand the connection between population and sustainable development.

Barfly: Why I left the Church
Opinion Column by Butch Dalisay, Newsbreak Editorial Consultant

LAST week, over dinner, my mother told me how she had met a man outside the church, begging for alms. He had been laid off, and had five children to feed—and he didn’t even look like he was in his thirties yet. “Why do you have so many children?” my mom said in despair, even as she handed him a 50-peso bill. “Well, I can’t put them back inside now, can I?” the man said with a sheepish smile.

I’m a soft touch myself when it comes to these things, but at that point I told my mother: “You should’ve told him to go ask the church for money, since they don’t believe we have a population problem.”

It was half in jest, of course, but it also reflected my longstanding exasperation with the Catholic Church’s position on birth control and contraception—recently in the news again because of the current debate over the Department of Health’s (DOH) “Ligtas Buntis” or “safe pregnancy” program, which the Church and its propagandists decry as barely disguised baby killing.

What’s the program, exactly? It’s a nationwide information campaign meant to give people informed options about “medically safe and legally acceptable family planning services,” says the DOH, after which these people can then be given “the appropriate services based on their own choice or referred to health facilities offering these services whether they plan to avoid, postpone, or continue their pregnancy.”

What’s wrong with that? Plenty, says the Church, which through spokesmen like a certain Fr. Roy Cimagala thunders, “This Ligtas Buntis campaign, while heavily sanitized and deodorized, continues to be afflicted with the basic sick idea that contraception is just okay, especially given the poverty, ignorance, blah, blah, blah of the people. When a basic moral issue is involved, the Church will not be silenced, even if it has to be crucified in public opinion.” Some other priests have reportedly refused to give communion to those who believe in Ligtas Buntis and in family planning.

I’m glad, in a way, when the Church speaks and thinks like this, because it reminds me of all the reasons why I left it. Sometimes -- usually during one Edsa People Power uprising or other -- I’m actually tempted to believe that this Church has come out of the Middle Ages and institutionalized the liberal progressiveness it manifests in other aspects of our national life. And then, just about when I feel like going back to church and genuflecting, I get a dose of what some bishop has to say about birth control, divorce, sexuality, women in the clergy, euthanasia, and censorship, and I feel happy and relieved to be away from all that -- well, not exactly, since there’s no way of escaping what we used to call “clerico-fascism” in this country of ours.

Like most Filipinos, I was born and raised a Catholic -- not that I had any choice. My parents -- simple provincial folk who nurtured middle-class dreams -- scrimped and saved to send me to a rich man’s school, which, in this country, almost invariably means a Catholic school. I heard Mass three times a week, learned to sing hymns in Latin, memorized all the mysteries of the Rosary, and did my ignorant best to believe in the Immaculate Conception. When we asked our catechism teacher, Brother Ramon, exactly how babies were made, he blushed and quickly changed the subject (and later, he would leave the brotherhood to marry, and presumably found the answer).

Then I went to the Philippine Science High School, and joined the Left shortly after. All the questions that had been building up in me found release, and met with answers that made sense. I didn’t become an atheist -- I still pray every night to a God who I think understands me better than all the world’s priests and shamans -- but I began to see the Church as an all-too-human organization, perhaps the first great multinational with an unbeatable business plan. I also saw it as a tremendously powerful political and social force, capable of doing both good and bad.

I do believe in the power and importance of religion in human life; I believe it should be taught -- as a historical and sociological concern -- even in secular State institutions. I believe that people should be free to practice their faith -- for as long as they don’t insist that you believe and behave as they do.

The Ligtas Buntis campaign, for some of us, doesn’t even go far enough, but at least it’s a step away from the virtual theocracy we’ve become in many respects.

This is, after all, a country where despite the constitutional separation of Church and State, our savvy politicians can’t resist sponsoring Masses in public places, and where even some University of the Philippines professors assume that everyone in the room must be a Christian and a Catholic, and so begin secular public functions with a prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ. Good Lord!

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