What was the law for?

Neither the pro-RH nor the anti-RH won the Supreme Court‘s decision that the RH law was constitutional. What it did was demonstrate that in principle, the law was unnecessary.

Had the two sides, anti and pro RH law examined their positions more deeply they would have realized that they were on the same side — the freedom of the individual. The Church was concerned that it was aimed at the poor, that we should have less of them if we were to be economically better off. The State on the other hand takes its position from policies handed down by richer and more developed nations that population control was necessary especially in poor and undeveloped countries.

True the Church was bound by its teachings on procreation but that was not the issue in the debate despite all media attempts to tar the Church. In defending the poor’s right to freedom that the rich enjoy to decide the size of their families it was strengthening social justice. Population control whether its advocates, accept it or not, was aimed at the poor. The unstated premise was there should be less of them if a country is to afford keeping people’s well-being and this is also the perspective on a wider scale on how to preserve the world’s resources for a few.

It is an economic problem masked as an ideological issue between church and state. The Church position favors the poor’s right to freedom. The rich decide how many children they would have whatever the Church teaching was. They have the best of both worlds, the freedom of choice as well as the means to support their choice.

The government’s job is to ensure the economic well being of its citizens. It is well known that a school of thought had taken over US policy as well as other developed countries to use birth control as a way out of poverty for poorer nations. The Philippines became a focus of that policy and the Aquino administration was set up to implement it.

Population control was already being implemented with funding from the USAID but with the US government in economic straits, it had to find a way so that Philippine government take over cost of implementing population control. But it had to formalize into law so the Philippine government is bound by law to provide the funds that had been provided by USAID. Only Congress can allocate funds for the implementation of national programs like population control. That is why it had to be made into a law.

The question is where will funds come from? With the House and the Senate conniving with the Executive, now under scrutiny for the misuse of pork barrel funds, thinking Filipinos will not accept the idea that funds from other programs should now be shifted to population control.

So it is not quite true that the debate or conflict between pro and anti RH bill was ideological. From the start it was an economic problem. The Church position is that there should be more development while the State believes there should be less people to afford a well-run economy.

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The new Chinese ambassador to the Philippines, Zhao Jianhua, comes at a difficult period of the South China conflict between the two countries.  He faces a tough job on how to revive bilateral negotiations between the two countries despite the Philippine hostile move to put the conflict into international arbitration with prodding from the  US.

Vietnam, also a claimant, has now broken away from the Philippines to pursue a joint action for arbitration.  Instead it has now forged several contracts for cooperation and development with China. It has opted for postponing the issue of contested claims.

At the same time that Zhao was presenting his credentials to the Philippine government, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was in Beijing. He displeased his Chinese hosts when he made statements favoring Japan, a US ally in the South China sea conflict.

Media reported the American official was scolded for supporting the nationalistic Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. It touched a raw nerve from the history of Chinese-Japanese relations especially in World War II. Moreover, the US and Japan are allies and have a mutual defense treaty. Hagel’s Chinese counterpart said “We will not tolerate these being infringed upon,” the Chinese defense chief declared, “even the least bit.”

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This week I have had to face the difficulty of reconciling beliefs and opinions I take for granted. One is what I think of Buddhism. I have always thought of it as impervious to conflict and violence. It is not so much a religion as a way of life that I find most conducive to peace to one’s own life and to the world at large.

So I was not surprised that Tzu Chi Foundation, a Buddhist group from Taiwan should be one of the biggest if not the biggest donor (more than a billion dollars) to the victims of Yolanda. Moreover as Minister Samson Chang and Peter Pan of the TECO office in Manila told me, the aid was put together with the help of the Taiwan government and other Buddhist donors around the world.

That was consistent with its teachings of how to stop suffering in the world through its “eight-fold path of right views, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.” It is concerned with how to act and follow a correct process through which one lives.

By coincidence, my daughter Veronica of Al Jazeera was visiting from Bangkok. From her I learned horrific stories of death and suffering inflicted on the Rohingya Muslims by the Buddhists in Myanmar. The latest report comes from the UN that some 48 Muslims may have been killed when Buddhist mobs attacked a village in an isolated corner of western Burma.

Ironically the breakdown of humanity appeared after the military regime was forced by Western sanctions to democratize. Myanmar’s government denied the report. But it opened my eyes to a situation I would not even have bothered about. Again there are also more enlightened Buddhists in Myanmar who are concerned with the inhumanity and are taking on the new government to find solutions to stop the violent ethnic cleansing taking place.

As Asians we are in a region percolating with trouble and need to be as concerned about our neighbors as we are on about our own politics.