The main roots of the moral controversy on abortion (the murder of God’s children) and contraception (obstruction of God’s will) among Catholics and other Christians, is when exactly such a sacred life creation process begins and ends, with a human person created in God’s image and likeness, together with an immortal soul infused by God deliberately in order to create a singularly unique person even before birth.
What does it mean to be “proabortion”? It means to favor abortion as the primary means of terminating or avoiding a pregnancy, to favor it above contraception, which seeks to prevent and protect against an unwanted or mistimed pregnancy.
“The single biggest promoter of increased abortions in the Philippines is the anti-RH movement,” says a coalition of reproductive health groups. The groups were reacting to statements made by “anti-RH” senator Tito Sotto, who, “based on evidence copied from Facebook, blogs and other similar sources … accuses several organizations and civil society leaders of promoting abortion.”
Given the heated arguments, maybe the title should end with a question mark. Is it possible to be sober, rational and truthful about reproductive health (RH), and still be a good Catholic? I, for one, certainly wouldn’t give up trying. My father was prefect of the Sodality in his student days at Ateneo (and member [...]
The Reproductive Health (RH) bill is not what you say it is. It is not a proabortion, antilife, and immoral measure.
“If everyone helps to hold up the sky, then a person does not tire.” This Ghanaian proverb describes a paradox that undergirds today’s fractious debate over the Reproductive Health bill. Seemingly intractable differences blur deep-rooted agreements.
Here’s something to grossly entertain you before I go into other grosser details. A 1996 Inquirer news brief about a hacking incident could have landed in the Guinness Book of World Records except that…
“Statistics are people with the tears wiped from their eyes.” The 2011 Family Health Survey, for example, documents that 221 mostly faceless mothers now die in every 100,000 live births.
She is 42 years old, has had 15 pregnancies, two of them miscarriages and one induced abortion. She has 12 children who are alive, the eldest of them aged 26 and the youngest about four or five. She has three grandchildren, two of them single mothers. I met Yoling (not her real name) last week. [...]
When I first went to Vietnam in 1992, the population of that country was 68.4 million people, or about four million more than the Philippines. Traveling through Songbe Province, where I was inspecting Oxfam-supported projects, was like being in the Philippine countryside in many respects, especially when it came to encountering large numbers of very [...]
I just want to help wake the Inquirer up from what I see might be its “RH infatuation,” which I believe led it to assert that the “best argument for the RH bill as it now stands is that it will help minimize the number of illegal or illicit abortions we suffer every year. Think [...]
I AM a devout Catholic. I agree with the opinion of our religious leaders that some contraceptives are abortifacients since they obstruct the development of fertilized human ovums. However, I am confused by the coercive approach proposed by some bishops and anti-RH bill groups, to which I belong, to have President Aquino excommunicated for his [...]
