Former Senator Francisco Tatad, who was information minister under the Marcos dictatorship, came out with the hysterical statement that the Reproductive Health Law is genocide. Other senators had the bright idea that only God knows when life begins. Indeed, only God knows because He is the source of all life.
But let us not forget that God gave man, together with his body, a spirit. That is the Spirit of God, the human conscience, through which man knows what is good and what is bad, and also what is the truth and what is a lie. Through his conscience, man has common sense that looks beyond law and human doctrine and can detect what is God’s will and what is not, when it comes to human life.
Regarding the debate on the constitutionality of the RH Law, one can clearly see the ambiguity and the hypocrisy of many of our lawmakers and of many of our bishops who stubbornly oppose the RH Law and who close their eyes and ears to what their conscience tells them.
The argument is that life begins at fertilization, and fertilization takes place when the sperm of the man and the egg of the woman meet each other. That is the technical description of what happens. No mention is made that a man and a woman meet each other there in love. That is why human life begins, in the first place. Then the conception takes place. If you use contraceptives then you prevent conception and that is murder, according to Tatad. He knows what murder is because he witnessed so many murders during the regime of Marcos.
No man who uses his common sense will accept these arguments. He will say: That kind of talk is big nonsense.
The Church says that the marital act is for procreation. If you use contraceptives you frustrate the act of procreation. But the Church teaches also that it is allowed to have intercourse during the period that the woman is infertile and therefore cannot conceive.
Then there is the “natural” method. The use of contraceptives is the “artificial” method and that is wrong. I agree that the natural method is, ideally speaking, the best method, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Maybe, the bishops do. And I disagree when they say that the artificial method is wrong. I speak out of experience.
The Church says: The RH Law is antilife. What life is the Church talking about? How about the life of those thousands of poor children who are starving to death from hunger and disease? Not to mention here the mothers who are dying because of unwanted or complicated pregnancies?
I believe we should look again at our Christian faith: God is the giver of life. I experienced this personally when I got married at an age difficult for a man to procreate. A doctor told me that I had a “low sperm count.” We tried very hard, but to no avail. When I consulted another doctor, he said: Oh no, there is nothing wrong with your sperm count. I will give you an alternative medicine. Right away my wife got pregnant and delivered a beautiful daughter of our own flesh and blood. Life is an accident, a chance, a coincidence.
We have a saying in the Dutch language: “De mens wikt, God beschikt.” In free translation, it means: Man deliberates, he weighs things for and against, but it is God who determines, who makes the decision.
As Christians we must have the highest respect for human life because it is a gift that comes from God. How many priests in the Catholic Church in the Philippines have sired children and are still allowed by their bishop to continue their priestly functions? Is that respect for human life? Should that priest not leave the priesthood and become a husband to the woman he has impregnated and a real “father” to the child he has produced?
Arnold Van Vugt was a Carmelite missionary from the Netherlands who came to the Philippines in 1961. He left the priesthood in 1988 and married a social worker in their parish in San Francisco, Agusan Sur, who had lost her husband in what he calls “a political accident.” The couple have seven children, including her six children whom he adopted and their biological daughter.