Dear Colleague:

Over the years, we have been the leading critic of China's one-child
policy.  Our chief goal has been to ensure that U.S. taxpayers are not
funding, directly or indirectly, China's program, and at this we have been
successful.  A second, closely related goal has been to prevent the U.N.
Population Fund from forcing programs of state control over fertility on
other countries.  This now threatens in the Philippines.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
13 January 2006
Vol. 8 / No. 2
 
Too Many Filipinos?  Soon, There Won't Be Enough
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
 
As early as Monday, January 16, the House of the Congress of the
Philippines will vote on a coercive population control measure pushed by
international agencies and their indigenous allies.  The Responsible
Parenthood and Population Management Act (HB 3773) would discriminate
against families with more than two children and force Catholic doctors
and nurses to provide sterilizations and contraceptives, probably
including the abortifacient morning-after pill.  "We know that over 100
congressmen [out of 238] are in favor of the bill but we can depend on
only less than 30 to object--those we have lobbied and truly believe in
our pro-life stand," says Sr. Mary Pilar Verzosa, RGS, who heads Pro-Life
Philippines.

International population controllers have targeted the Philippines, one of
the last majority Christian nations in the world where people still have
enough children to guarantee their country's future.  Perhaps because of
this, HB 3773 aims to impose a two-child quota on Filipino families,
redirecting government resources from programs that help poor Filipinos to
programs that will help eliminate them.

Even from a pro-population control perspective, this bill is entirely
unnecessary.  The Filipino birthrate has been dropping rapidly and, even
according to the United Nations Population Division, will drop below the
replacement rate of 2.1 in the foreseeable future.  Filipinas have gone
from having six children, in the course of their lifetimes on average, in
1970 to 5 in 1980, 4 in 1990, and 2.8 today.  The UN says that in 20
years, Filipinos will be having fewer children than are necessary to
sustain the population.  Instead of trying to force Filipinos to have
fewer children, Filipino politicians should be trying to figure out how to
avoid the coming demographic implosion while there is still time (see
PRI's Weekly Briefing, "Population Controllers Target One of the Last
Pro-Family Christian Nations," July 15, 2005,
www.pop.org/main.cfm?EID=837).

But big international money comes with anti-people policies, not pro-life
ones, and the usual suspects including the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) are
involved.  "Pro-population control agencies such as USAID and UNFPA fund
the campaign for the bill to be passed into law," says Sr. Pilar.  "They
have attractive-looking ladies on their staff, going from one
congressman's office to another distributing glossy magazines and
materials on the importance of the bill, they go on road shows all over
the country, and they have set up reproductive health clinics in the
provinces.  Many local government units, governors and mayors, accept the
projects they offer because contraception is integrated with other health
services.  They also call for press conferences and conduct two- and
three-day seminars in big hotels for media people to promote the bill."

This bill "is an affront to the Culture of Life in the United States and
not just in the Philippines," says Eileen Macapanas Cosby, an American of
Filipino descent who has helped organize opposition to HB 3773 through the
Filipino Family Fund (www.filipinofamilyfund.org). "If we let the most
Catholic country in the world--87% of nearly 85 million people are
Catholic--fall prey to these fringe groups, this will be a huge blow to
the pro-family and pro-life movement."

HB 3773 grants preference in college scholarships to children from
families with only one or two children, discriminating against those from
families with three or more.  Population officers would be mandated in
each local district as in Communist China, and surely would have an
incentive to use vigorous methods to meet birth limitation quotas.  The
Filipino Catholic bishops' conference has already documented instances of
forced sterilization in the Philippines, where the contraceptive mentality
and overpopulation myth have made steady progress in recent decades.

The bill "violates the freedom of religious belief since it mandates
health service providers to implement procedures contrary to their
religious beliefs and penalizes them if they refuse," says Sr. Pilar.  "It
will corrupt the youth through mandatory sex education that emphasizes
contraception and population control, and further reduces the time
allotment for more relevant subjects, worsening the already ineffective
education system."  Catholic schools are not exempted from the sex
education requirement of the bill, and Catholic doctors and nurses could
go to jail for six months for refusing to sterilize or distribute
contraceptives.

Opponents of the bill hope President Gloria Arroyo will veto the bill if
it passes both houses of the Congress, but her veto could be overridden by
a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.

"The State likewise guarantees universal access to safe, affordable and
quality reproductive health care services, methods, devices and relevant
information thereon even as it prioritizes the needs of women and
children, among other underprivileged sectors," says HB 3773, although it
also says the Philippines' anti-abortion law won't be touched.  Yet this
sort of sweeping language can be interpreted to include just about
anything, as UN bureaucrats and courts in other nations have amply
demonstrated.

If the Philippines' birthrate continues to drop, that country will face
the same graying population and lack of tax-paying workers that is
beginning to crush Western Europe and Japan.  Unlike the other two, the
Philippines can't begin to afford financially such a situation.  It
remains to be seen if the Filipino Congress will side with both freedom
and prudence, or help to pass a death sentence on its own people.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.


_____
PRI
P.O. Box 1559
Front Royal, Va. 22630
USA
Phone: (540) 622-5240 Fax: (540) 622-2728
Email: jad@pop.org
Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
(540) 622-5240, ext. 204
Website: www.pop.org
_________
(c) 2005 Population Research Institute. Permission to reprint granted.
Redistribute widely. Credit required.
_________
If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to PRI, please go to
http://pop.org/donate.cfm. All donations (of any size) are welcomed and
appreciated.
_________
To subscribe to the Weekly Briefing, send an email to:
http://pop.org/subscribe-weekly.cfm or email us at pri@pop.org and say
"Add me to your Weekly Briefing."
__________
The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human
rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending
counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of
"overpopulation."