Lacson’s masterstroke
December 1st, 2002
Who’s afraid of the family-planning issue? Almost any politician you can name. But not Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who declared on Tuesday that he was all for encouraging the use of artificial means of contraception.
Lacson may have struck pay dirt. The Church has always been opposed to him anyway, and whoever’s managing his campaign knows Church influence over the public on the famil-planning issue to be steadily declining, if not near zero.
Ironically (women’s groups take a very dim view of a Lacson presidency), he may have also struck a chord with the long-suffering half of the population for whom following Church strictures has meant debilitating perpetual pregnancies.
Putting an end to those pregnancies and on a large scale is so obviously in the national interest that few Filipinos, and certainly none of Lacson’s masa constituencies who love his law-and-order image, would argue against it.
In the 2000 census, there were already 76.5 million Filipinos, an increase of 7.9 million over the 1995 count (68.6 million) and by 15.8 million over the 1990 figures (60.1 million).
The National Statistics Office says 76.8 million is 10 times the Philippine population in 1903. Philippine population growth in the second half of the 1990s was 2.36 percent, or 1.7 million persons a year. Although 2.36 percent is less than the 3.08 percent of the sixties, the current growth rate is still one of the highest in the world.
Despite these figures, the Arroyo administration has abandoned family-planning programs based on artificial means such as condoms and the pill, in obedience to Church dicta. The Catholic Church allows only natural methods of birth control, primarily the rhythm method—whose practitioners end up unwilling parents to unwanted children. (Old 1960s joke: What do you call practitioners of the rhythm method? Answer: parents.)
The results of rapid and sustained population growth are evident in a country besieged by poverty and underdevelopment. Infant and maternal mortality rates are soaring. Millions die from preventable diseases. Schoolchildren hold classes in leaking schoolrooms and under trees. Some 10 percent of the population confess to being hungry most of the time. A housing crisis occurs in virtually every town and city, in which increasing numbers of citizens sleep on the streets and under bridges.
The Catholic Church has argued that Philippine poverty can be addressed by redistributing wealth, there being so few with everything while millions have nothing. The more thoughtful among the religious have also likened an aggressive family-planning program to cutting the foot to fit the shoe. Cutting population to fit existing social and economic capacities to sustain it also assumes that unjust social and economic structures cannot be changed.
Wealth can indeed be redistributed, as some countries have starkly demonstrated, and unjust economic and social structures reformed or dismantled and replaced. But while both have occurred in other countries, neither has in the Philippines, and the prospects for either or both happening dim by the week.
As the attention of the country’s so-called leaders remain focused on 2004 and how to prevail in that year’s elections, or on how to extract millions more from the treasury, the children Filipinos are experts in producing continue to die as their parents grovel in the 300-year miseries of Philippine society.
The ineptitude, lack of imagination and plain stupidity of political leaderships not only in the Philippines but in other, equally benighted countries have made an aggressive population program the only alternative to a runaway birthrate that ironically dooms so many to early deaths and many more to short and brutal lives.
The difference is that in many of those countries, especially those in Asia, there is no Catholic Church to declare from thousands of pulpits that it’s wrong to use a condom either to prevent conception or to practice safe sex. The Church’s position on family planning has long been a stumbling block to checking the birthrate, thanks to politicians fearful of Church influence.
The Church is indeed a powerful institution in many ways, but primarily because it has the ear of political authority, which in many cases craft and implement policy according to Church wishes. But while it’s easy enough to get Malacañang to ban a film or to allow school prayers, it is less easy to compel the public to act according to its teachings if these are clearly in conflict with its perceived interests and current sentiments.
The Church did help mobilize Filipinos twice in recent times in removing presidents from office, but it could not have done so without already widespread public sentiment for change. On the other hand, consider 1992, when the Church declared its support for the late Ramon V. Mitra for the presidency. Or 1998, when it campaigned against Joseph Estrada—for whom over 8 million, most of them Catholics, voted anyway.
There are limits to the power of any institution, among them the political system’s refusal to heed it as well as life’s daily realities. Lacson is in effect promising a leadership that will not only ignore, but also oppose, the Church’s position. For an increasing number of Filipinos, on the other hand, life’s realities include having more children than one can feed, house, educate and clothe.
Women’s groups thus point out that among poor women fewer children has become a self-evident option in the face of galloping poverty, and never mind what the Church says. What they would most like to find out is what means are available to help them space their children or stop producing them altogether.
The fear of the Church about family planning is thus based on the myth of its being all-powerful, whether politically or in terms of its capacity to influence the private behavior of its flock.
By declaring his commitment to pursue a family-planning program based on artificial means of contraception, Lacson apparently hoped to achieve at least two things. First, to invite Church reaction to his family-planning position and incidentally divert both its and the public’s attention from the issues (his human rights record, his alleged involvement in the Kuratong Baleleng murders and in money laundering, etc.) he knows will be raised against him; and second, to invite comparisons with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s capitulation to the Church’s position.
He had a third purpose, however, which was to give the public the impression that he’s starting an issue-based campaign—a departure from the usual politico’s practice in these parts of singing and dancing his way to the top.
His publicist probably hopes that this will strike a chord with those Filipinos sick of the circuses electoral campaigns have become—and thus earn Lacson a slice of the votes of the better informed among the electorate. In addition, his taking a stand on an issue few politicians want to even mention also invites comparisons with Fernando Poe Jr., against whose putative candidacy his alleged lack of issue awareness has been raised. Compared with Poe, Lacson’s a statesman.
Compared with Sen. Edgardo Angara’s, on the other hand, Lacson’s chances of prevailing in 2004, given his admitted popularity, plus the possible swing to his side of the Joseph Estrada constituencies, appear a whole lot greater. That makes Lacson the probable opposition candidate in 2004—when a three-way contest between him, Raul Roco and Mrs. Arroyo could result in his emerging number one.
To this possibility one can either react with renewed commitment to prevent a Lacson victory, or with an immigrant visa application at the friendliest foreign embassy. Either reaction, however, would attest to Lacson’s astute political sense.
Lacson may not be the proper advocate of family planning, besides cynically using it to divert attention from his less endearing qualities, as many have argued. But his declaration cannot be anything but a masterstroke. It is now up to his rivals, as well as others who shudder at the thought of a Lacson presidency, to do him one better.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, November 23, 2002)