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 of tens of thousands of innocent lives spared.”
A cold shower of scientific findings might help.
First, from a study on the link between contraception and abortion (published early this year, not in a prolife magazine but in the scientific journal, Contraception, subtitled “an international reproductive health journal” and conducted through a 10-year period). From 1997 to 2007, the overall use of contraceptive methods increased from 49.1 percent to 79.9 percent. The elective abortion rate increased from 5.52 to 11.49 per 1,000 women.
Second, Nobel prize winner and liberal economist, George Akerlof, writing at the Quarterly Journal of Economics (published by the MIT Press), described the effect of contraceptives: more premarital sex, more fatherless children, more single mothers, and since the contraceptives sometimes fail, more abortions.
Third, leaders of the abortion industry themselves have openly admitted the empirical link between contraception and abortion. Malcolm Potts, the first medical director of International Planned Parenthood: “As people turn to contraception, there will be a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate.” Judith Bury, coordinator of Doctors for a Woman’s Choice on Abortion: “There is overwhelming evidence that … the provision of contraception leads to an increase in the abortion rate.”
Fourth, silent abortions caused by the use of the pill amount to deliberate killings of innocent lives. Dr. Walter Larimore, who for decades prescribed the pill, tried to disprove the claim that the pill is abortifacient, only to find 94 scientific studies proving that “postfertilization effects are operative to prevent clinically recognized pregnancy.” He published his findings in the scientific journal of the American Medical Association, and from then on stopped prescribing the pill. Shouldn’t we as a nation also stop prescribing a drug that kills our youngest Filipinos?
Please take note that the basis of Rep. Edcel Lagman’s claim of an 85-percent reduction in abortion rate due to contraception is a report of the Guttmacher Institute, which started as a division of Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortion services in the United States.
It is significant that the Guttmacher Institute itself found in its 2003 study that “levels of abortion and contraceptive use rose simultaneously” in six countries: Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United States, Singapore and the Republic of Korea.
These are hard facts. And the rational explanation behind the link is clear: the anti-human mentality at the heart of contraception’s falsification of sex, which casually call some children “unwanted” rather than gifts.
—RAUL NIDOY,
ranidoy@gmail.com