The condom junta

It is tyranny.

So sayeth Melvin Castro, spokesman of the Church, voice of the living God, arbiter of truth, freedom and democracy, who decided to hijack media’s political calendar by equating government provision of free contraception to the 1972 imposition of martial law. That he failed to link the Reproductive Health bill to the anniversary of the Aug. 23 hostage-taking is perhaps only a matter of oversight. It is reasonable to expect a press release on Nov. 23 saying the defenders of the RH bill have committed the same sins as those who massacred 58 people in Maguindanao.

He tells Church-run Radyo Veritas that the RH bill “imposes on the people especially the youth to embrace contraceptive mentality,” an act that intentionally seeks to destroy the morals of our young people and is “one of the worst forms of dictatorship.”

That he sees fit to put side by side the enormity of human rights abuses in the ’70s and a move to enact the RH bill demonstrates precisely how much the gentleman representative of the Commission on Family and Life of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines values family and life. A box of free condoms given out by a government health center may not mean much to many in terms of metaphor, but to Castro, it is an act worse than the last 37 years Cecilia Lagman had lived without her son Hermon, a human rights lawyer who disappeared during the Marcos regime. To Castro, the offer of an IUD to a 40-year-old mother with a brood of 12 is worse than being clouted with a broomstick while hanging between two iron beds, the same way contraceptive pills are worse than waiting for a smirking colonel to pull the trigger of the clicking revolver tucked inside your mouth.

Although it is doubtful that Hilda Narciso, a teacher who was arrested, interrogated and sexually abused during martial law would have seen the connection between torture and a condom, Castro has seen it, and because he has, it must be true.

This is not to say that Castro’s one-man marketing campaign against the RH bill is impeccable, although his timing certainly is. He forgets to attribute his use of the martial law metaphor to one Lito Atienza, former mayor of Manila, he of the Hawaiian prints and celebrity children, who in April of 2011 announced in a forum in Greenhills that the bill is worse than martial law “because you are going to force the women to take drugs that are destructive of their systems.”

Atienza was behind the 2000 Manila contraception ban, Executive Order 003, a directive that lasted nearly a decade and effectively made artificial contraception an impossibility to impoverished residents. The EO led to the removal of condoms, birth control pills and sterilizations from the services offered by government-sponsored hospitals and health centers.

In an interview with Time magazine, Atienza denied a link between population and poverty. “I reject the notion that we are poor because we are plenty.” He argued that family planning advocates have been brainwashed by the West, and that the intent behind the EO 003 ban was to teach Manila’s “innocent and ignorant” women “true” Filipino values. Perhaps he was not as efficient as he had hoped. A Guttmacher study has shown increases of induced abortion cases occurred in Manila during the contraception ban.

This year, Atienza delivered a homily on martial law and reproductive health. He said that all those who support the RH bill keep on saying that 11 women die daily of childbirth, and it is a justification to pass the law.

“Let’s accept the fact that 11 women die of childbirth. How many die of TB? How many die of hunger? How many die of tuberculosis, cancer, heart failure, even of nightmares and accidents? People die, we have to accept that. Don’t blame [a lack of contraception.] It’s as if passing the RH bill will mean no Filipina will die. Is that your logic?”

People die, the mayor is right. He is not right in assuming that this is not a reason for government action, the same as health care and advice are offered to those with cancer and TB, the same ways laws are created to punish traffic violators, and manslaughter cases are lobbed at killer bus operators, and why it is right for every citizen with a voice to protest government inaction in the slew of “salvagings” that are littering Navotas alleys. We stand for life, said the former mayor, and will battle any move that breaks the Constitution’s definition of life as conception to natural death. Perhaps the former mayor is unaware that death by accident is unnatural, the same as death by childbirth and hunger and a bullet through the back of a 17-year-old boy’s neck. No matter how much Atienza upgrades hospital birthing facilities, or how much money he hands out as prizes to women with armies of children during elections, women will die, because 15 children shoved down a skinny woman’s birth canal is also unnatural.

This is where Castro and Atienza meet, in the odd logic that the RH bill is dictatorship to women “because you are going to force the women to take drugs that are destructive of their systems.” Castro argues that the repercussions of the controversial birth control measure might even be worse than the Marcos regime, since the public is not being told about it by its proponents and advocates.

It is difficult to call out a former mayor and call him a liar, the same way it is difficult to call Castro a fool, but perhaps it is more Christian to assume both choose to be deliberately misleading instead of arguing the other possibility – that the mayor is a moron who never read the bill, and that Castro’s God is nicknamed Castro.

What makes martial law is the absence of freedom, and the belief of a supreme authority that the wellbeing of many depends on the imposed will of one. The masses are ignorant, the women are whores, the sin is to give them the choice to choose. This is not yet tyranny, but it won’t stop these men from trying to impose it.