The Reproductive Health Bill
17 October 2008 -- At the joint general membership meeting of the Makati Business Club and Management Association of the Philippines at the Peninsula Manila, three speakers—Prof. Felipe Medalla, Atty. Ricardo Romulo, and Dr. Roberto De Vera—shared their views on House Bill 5043, or the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act. The controversial measure, popularly known as the RH bill, was first filed in 2001, but it is only in the current 14th Congress that it reached second reading in the House.
Population Growth and Poverty
Although he acknowledged that it has its flaws, Prof. Medalla stated that he fully supports the passage of HB 5043 because of its impact on the lives of poor Filipinos. While poverty incidence is less than 10% among one-child families, it is 57% among families with nine or more children, he pointed out. If the population issue is not addressed, he warned that children from poor families will be more uneducated, unhealthy, and malnourished.
Prof. Medalla believes public subsidies for family planning services, such as those provided for by the bill, is good public policy simply because it is good for the poor. Moreover, while per capita income may not necessarily rise with lower birth rates, neither will high birth rates contribute to making the country richer in per capita terms.
On the other hand, Dr. De Vera, a firm opponent of the RH bill, cited findings that there is no clear association between population growth rates and per capita income. He conceded that poverty incidence is higher among bigger families, but this doesn’t mean that family size is the cause of their hardship. Instead, he pointed to the lack of, or limited, education as the primary cause of poverty. He added that growth will be achieved and inequality reduced through good governance and sound and well-implemented economic policies.
Dr. De Vera also highlighted the fact that countries that adopted two-child or population management policies are now actually offering incentives to couples to have babies. This, according to him, is because when the fertility rate drops to 1.3 children per woman, the population decline becomes irreversible, leading to “demographic suicide.”
Impact on the Family and Society
Prof. Medalla backed the main thrust of the bill to enable “couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information and means to carry out their decisions.” He believes that HB 5043 will help empower the poor, especially women, to implement their choices, which is of great importance given the finding that 44% of pregnancies of the poorest 10% of women of reproductive age are unwanted. The bill is correct in making artificial methods of family planning more accessible, he said, because natural methods are simply “too difficult” to follow and the failure rate too high
One of the areas Prof. Medalla disagrees with in the RH bill is the issue of sex and reproductive health education. While he supports its inclusion in the intermediate and high school curricula, he thinks it should not be mandatory. He believes parents should have the right to demand that their children be exempted from sex education classes.
Dr. De Vera sees the bill as standing on shaky social and moral grounds, believing it will discourage the free exercise of responsible parenthood and will lead to an increase in abortions and certain cancers. He cited reports that intrauterine devices (IUDs) and birth control pills are really abortifacients and that oral contraceptives increase the risk of breast and cervical cancer.
On Legislating Family Planning
Atty. Romulo, for his part, recognizes the need to adopt measures that will effectively manage the country’s population in order to achieve sustainable development. However, he is against HB 5043’s criminalization of acts that involve sensitive issues of morality and conscience.
He maintained that the reproductive health program should be implemented by persuasion and not by conviction or threats. The objectives of the bill will be realized only if the people are convinced that family planning is good. He therefore proposed the deletion of the bill’s Sections 17 (Employer’s Responsibilities) and 21 (Prohibited Acts), saying it is unwise to criminalize the acts listed in these sections as it unnecessarily infringes on a person’s right to privacy and freedom of conscience.
Prof. Medalla also opposes the imposition of prison sentences on such offenses as a health care provider’s refusal to perform ligation or vasectomy. However, he maintained that the law is needed. “Although the poor’s access to family planning services can be improved even without the law,” he explained, “the absence of the law makes it easier to block the program, which is what the Arroyo administration has been doing.”
Meanwhile, for Dr. De Vera, the family came before the state and, therefore, the state does not have dominion over the family.
The Verdict
Towards the end of the meeting, MBC and MAP members and their guests were asked to participate in an informal survey as to whether they are in favor or not in favor of the passage of HB 5043. Of the 96 persons who attended the meeting, 20 said they were in favor of the passage of the bill, 27 said they were not in favor, while 25 did not answer. Another 24 said they were in favor but subject to the proposed amendments of Atty. Romulo to delete Sections 17 and 21. Medalla's speech | Romulo's speech | De Vera's speech
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Felipe M. Medalla
Prof. Medalla teaches at and was a former dean of the UP School of Economics. Armed with a PhD in economics from Northwestern University and an impressive background in economic research, he served as socioeconomic planning secretary and director-general of the National Economic and Development Authority from 1998 to 2001.
Ricardo j. Romulo
Atty. Romulo was chairman of the MBC from 1987 to 2006 and is still a member of the Club’s board. A Doctor of Laws degree holder from the Harvard Law School, he is a senior partner of the Romulo, Mabanta, Buenaventura, Sayoc & De Los Angeles law firm and was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission.
Roberto E. De Vera
Dr. De Vera is the director of the Urban Strategies Group of the University of Asia and the Pacific’s School of Economics. He is also director of the MS Industrial Economics Program and an assistant professor of the UA&P. He earned his PhD in economics from the University of Pittsburgh.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Scholars: contraception played a key role in divorce revolution, social pathology and poverty
Scholars from Robert Michael at University of Chicago to George Akerlof at the University of California at Berkeley argue that contraception played a central role in launching the sexual and divorce revolutions of the late twentieth century.
Contraceptive Losers
Michael has argued that about half of the increase in divorce from 1965 to 1976 can be attributed to the “unexpected nature of the contraceptive revolution”—especially in the way that it made marriages less child-centered.1 Akerlof argues that the availability first of contraception and then of abortion in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the crucial factors fueling the sexual revolution and the collapse of marriage among the working class and the poor.
I will focus on Akerlof’s scholarship. George Akerlof is a Nobel prize-winning economist, a professor at Berkeley, and a former fellow at the Brookings Institution; he is not a conservative. In two articles in leading economic journals, Akerlof details findings and advances arguments that vindicate Paul VI’s prophetic warnings about the social consequences of contraception for morality and men.2
In his first article, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1996, Akerlof began by asking why the United States witnessed such a dramatic increase in illegitimacy from 1965 to 1990—from 24 percent to 64 percent among African-Americans, and from 3 percent to 18 percent among whites. He noted that public health advocates had predicted that the widespread availability of contraception and abortion would reduce illegitimacy, not increase it. So what happened?
Using the language of economics, Akerlof pointed out that “technological innovation creates both winners and losers.” In this case the introduction of widespread effective contraception—especially the pill—put traditional women with an interest in marriage and children at “competitive disadvantage” in the relationship “market” compared to modern women who took a more hedonistic approach to sex and relationships. The contraceptive revolution also reduced the costs of sex for women and men, insofar as the threat of childbearing was taken off the table, especially as abortion became widely available in the 1970s.
The consequence? Traditional women could no longer hold the threat of pregnancy over their male partners, either to avoid sex or to elicit a promise of marriage in the event their partner made them pregnant. And modern women no longer worried about getting pregnant. Accordingly, more and more women (traditional as well as modern) gave in to their boyfriends’ entreaties for sex.
In Akerlof’s words, “the norm of premarital sexual abstinence all but vanished in the wake of the technology shock.” Women felt free or obligated to have sex before marriage. For instance, Akerlof finds that the percentage of girls 16 and under reporting sexual activity surged in 1970 and 1971 as contraception and abortion became common in many states throughout the country.
Immiserating Sex
Thus, the sexual revolution left traditional or moderate women who wanted to avoid premarital sex or contraception “immiserated” because they could not compete with women who had no serious objection to premarital sex, and they could no longer elicit a promise of marriage from boyfriends in the event they got pregnant. Boyfriends, of course, could say that pregnancy was their girlfriends’ choice. So men were less likely to agree to a shotgun marriage in the event of a pregnancy than they would have been before the arrival of the pill and abortion.
Thus, many traditional women ended up having sex and having children out of wedlock, while many of the permissive women ended up having sex and contracepting or aborting so as to avoid childbearing. This explains in large part why the contraceptive revolution was associated with an increase in both abortion and illegitimacy.
In his second article, published in The Economic Journal in 1998, Akerlof argues that another key outworking of the contraceptive revolution was the disappearance of marriage—shotgun and otherwise—for men. Contraception and abortion allowed men to put off marriage, even in cases where they had fathered a child. Consequently, the fraction of young men who were married in the United States dropped precipitously. Between 1968 and 1993 the percentage of men 25 to 34 who were married with children fell from 66 percent to 40 percent. Accordingly, young men did not benefit from the domesticating influence of wives and children.
Instead, they could continue to hang out with their young male friends, and were thus more vulnerable to the drinking, partying, tomcatting, and worse that is associated with unsupervised groups of young men. Absent the domesticating influence of marriage and children, young men—especially men from working-class and poor families—were more likely to respond to the lure of the street. Akerlof noted, for instance, that substance abuse and incarceration more than doubled from 1968 to 1998. Moreover, his statistical models indicate that the growth in single men in this period was indeed linked to higher rates of substance abuse, arrests for violent crimes, and drinking.
From this research, Akerlof concluded by arguing that the contraceptive revolution played a key, albeit indirect, role in the dramatic increase in social pathology and poverty this country witnessed in the 1970s; it did so by fostering sexual license, poisoning the relations between men and women, and weakening the marital vow. In Akerlof’s words:
Just at the time, about 1970, that the permanent cure to poverty seemed to be on the horizon and just at the time that women had obtained the tools to control the number and the timing of their children, single motherhood and the feminization of poverty began their long and steady rise.
Furthermore, the decline in marriage caused in part by the contraceptive revolution “intensified . . . the crime shock and the substance abuse shock” that marked the 1970s and 1980s.
http://www.nfpoutreach.org/library/facts_life-marriage.htm
Contraceptive Losers
Michael has argued that about half of the increase in divorce from 1965 to 1976 can be attributed to the “unexpected nature of the contraceptive revolution”—especially in the way that it made marriages less child-centered.1 Akerlof argues that the availability first of contraception and then of abortion in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the crucial factors fueling the sexual revolution and the collapse of marriage among the working class and the poor.
I will focus on Akerlof’s scholarship. George Akerlof is a Nobel prize-winning economist, a professor at Berkeley, and a former fellow at the Brookings Institution; he is not a conservative. In two articles in leading economic journals, Akerlof details findings and advances arguments that vindicate Paul VI’s prophetic warnings about the social consequences of contraception for morality and men.2
In his first article, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1996, Akerlof began by asking why the United States witnessed such a dramatic increase in illegitimacy from 1965 to 1990—from 24 percent to 64 percent among African-Americans, and from 3 percent to 18 percent among whites. He noted that public health advocates had predicted that the widespread availability of contraception and abortion would reduce illegitimacy, not increase it. So what happened?
Using the language of economics, Akerlof pointed out that “technological innovation creates both winners and losers.” In this case the introduction of widespread effective contraception—especially the pill—put traditional women with an interest in marriage and children at “competitive disadvantage” in the relationship “market” compared to modern women who took a more hedonistic approach to sex and relationships. The contraceptive revolution also reduced the costs of sex for women and men, insofar as the threat of childbearing was taken off the table, especially as abortion became widely available in the 1970s.
The consequence? Traditional women could no longer hold the threat of pregnancy over their male partners, either to avoid sex or to elicit a promise of marriage in the event their partner made them pregnant. And modern women no longer worried about getting pregnant. Accordingly, more and more women (traditional as well as modern) gave in to their boyfriends’ entreaties for sex.
In Akerlof’s words, “the norm of premarital sexual abstinence all but vanished in the wake of the technology shock.” Women felt free or obligated to have sex before marriage. For instance, Akerlof finds that the percentage of girls 16 and under reporting sexual activity surged in 1970 and 1971 as contraception and abortion became common in many states throughout the country.
Immiserating Sex
Thus, the sexual revolution left traditional or moderate women who wanted to avoid premarital sex or contraception “immiserated” because they could not compete with women who had no serious objection to premarital sex, and they could no longer elicit a promise of marriage from boyfriends in the event they got pregnant. Boyfriends, of course, could say that pregnancy was their girlfriends’ choice. So men were less likely to agree to a shotgun marriage in the event of a pregnancy than they would have been before the arrival of the pill and abortion.
Thus, many traditional women ended up having sex and having children out of wedlock, while many of the permissive women ended up having sex and contracepting or aborting so as to avoid childbearing. This explains in large part why the contraceptive revolution was associated with an increase in both abortion and illegitimacy.
In his second article, published in The Economic Journal in 1998, Akerlof argues that another key outworking of the contraceptive revolution was the disappearance of marriage—shotgun and otherwise—for men. Contraception and abortion allowed men to put off marriage, even in cases where they had fathered a child. Consequently, the fraction of young men who were married in the United States dropped precipitously. Between 1968 and 1993 the percentage of men 25 to 34 who were married with children fell from 66 percent to 40 percent. Accordingly, young men did not benefit from the domesticating influence of wives and children.
Instead, they could continue to hang out with their young male friends, and were thus more vulnerable to the drinking, partying, tomcatting, and worse that is associated with unsupervised groups of young men. Absent the domesticating influence of marriage and children, young men—especially men from working-class and poor families—were more likely to respond to the lure of the street. Akerlof noted, for instance, that substance abuse and incarceration more than doubled from 1968 to 1998. Moreover, his statistical models indicate that the growth in single men in this period was indeed linked to higher rates of substance abuse, arrests for violent crimes, and drinking.
From this research, Akerlof concluded by arguing that the contraceptive revolution played a key, albeit indirect, role in the dramatic increase in social pathology and poverty this country witnessed in the 1970s; it did so by fostering sexual license, poisoning the relations between men and women, and weakening the marital vow. In Akerlof’s words:
Just at the time, about 1970, that the permanent cure to poverty seemed to be on the horizon and just at the time that women had obtained the tools to control the number and the timing of their children, single motherhood and the feminization of poverty began their long and steady rise.
Furthermore, the decline in marriage caused in part by the contraceptive revolution “intensified . . . the crime shock and the substance abuse shock” that marked the 1970s and 1980s.
http://www.nfpoutreach.org/library/facts_life-marriage.htm
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
