In the following letter, a dear friend and associate warns her fellow Filipinos of what she has witnessed first hand in the West: the breakdown of morality, family and faith due to sex education and contraception. Her letter is in response to “The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health and Population and Development Act of 2011″ (commonly known as the Reproductive Health Act, the RH Act or RH Bill), which is currently being debated in the Philippines.
To My Dear Fellow Filipinos:
The unfolding possibility of the RH Bill’s passing by our government fills me with horror and foreboding because so few understand the impact that such a bill would have on our children, our families, our moral values and the future of our nation. My conscience would never let me rest if I didn’t make a small effort to weigh in with what I have come to discover while living in the United States for almost 23 years.
The birth of my grandchild when my daughter was in crisis led me to get involved with mothers in crisis pregnancies so that they, like my daughter, would choose life for their babies. After 50 million abortions resulting from Roe vs. Wade that legalized abortion in the US, there are millions of women that have suffered its devastating consequences.
In the nearly 22 years I have been actively involved with these women, I began to see so clearly that the ultimate devastating decision to abort came as a direct link to failed contraception or its ensuing contraceptive mentality. There is a tremendous array of “effective” contraceptive drugs, many of them abortifacients, and devices available to women (some as young as 12) promoted through sex education in schools, magazines and the multi-media. Yet they have only served to increase the number of abortions (1.5 million annually) and the number of sexually transmitted diseases from a handful to over 50 strains in just a little over 40 years. Condoms do not prevent the transmission of many of these strains.
I have spoken to and mentored hundreds of teenage girls and young women, not one of whom was told of her unique gifts and dignity as a woman and mother. They were very receptive to messages of abstinence and natural family planning once they understood their true meaning because they have been naturally and divinely wired to believe those truths.
These are statistics and facts, but I have had the unique experience of seeing these young women heartbroken and hurt by this contraceptive culture. Most of them come from broken homes and parents who are also products of this contraceptive age. How is it not possible to see an epidemic of pregnancies among young teenagers (14, 15, and 16 year-olds) with contraception and sex education available to all? (Day care centers are now being built at public high schools.) We see so many at the center where I work. Our modern woman is told she can finally claim her reproductive rights, but she has only become a victim to greater exploitation and worse, having been convinced that destroying her unwanted, unborn child is also her option and right.
Make no mistake; the bitter fruit of contraception is abortion and the devastation of the family. Look at Thailand, the country so successful at controlling her population through a massive condom program – she is now the Aids capital of Asia. Look at its bitter fruit in the West, with its runaway abortion numbers, countless divorces, the threat to legal marriage between a man and a woman and the spread of socially transmitted diseases that are resistant to treatment. Without the building block of healthy families, these nations will soon be ungovernable, if they are not already.
There is a quiet desperation I feel as I watch the country I deeply love go down the path so many others have gone, abandoning their Christian principles and moral roots. The poet George Santayana once said, “Those who have not learned from history are doomed to repeat it”. If we go down the same path, we will lose out greatest assets – our family values and our faith-filled people.
I urge those who have the power to do so, not to pass this bill—and for those that don’t, to pray to a much higher Power that it doesn’t. If it isn’t passed, if we can find the means to control our population the natural way without destroying our values, we will see our country blessed in ways we can never imagine. Our nation once again can show the world that a people that successfully resisted a tyrant can resist the tyranny of outside influences that seek to destroy our families. In 1986, our people fought for democracy; today,we fight for our national soul. If we do succeed, it will make People Power look like a minor miracle.
Patsy M. Sevilla-Gonzalez
Patsy Gonzalez counsels pregnant mothers at Juan Diego Society Women’s Center in San Jose, CA. She also volunteers as an “angel” for The Gabriel Project of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and has extensive experience in sidewalk counseling.
Related:
The Catholic Position on the RH Bill
Millennium Development Goals / United Nations
