Billy Collins - "Litany"

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Morality of Means

by Bishop Teodoro Bacani Jr.
Manila Standard Today
Saturday-Sunday, September 27-28, 2008


Many of our people, I believe, labor from many misconceptions about the Church’s stand regarding numerous matters connected with the population question. For example, there are those who believe that the Church does not acknowledge the existence of a population problem. The fact is that the Church has often acknowledged the existence and the complexity of the population problem, not only in some parts of the world, but specifically in the Philippines. I have documented this in my book, “The Church and Birth Control.”

Related to this, there are also those who think that the Church is against any effort of government to slow down our population growth rate. But the truth is that the Church acknowledges the right of the state to orient the demography of the population. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, par.2372). The decision to accelerate, maintain or decelerate the population growth rate must be based on economic and social realities. All three options (acceleration, maintenance, deceleration) are all possible moral options according to circumstances.

The Church is not against the control of the population growth rate. It accepts population management through self-control. Further, the Church holds that the decision regarding the number of a couple’s children belongs only to the couple concerned and not to the government, the Church or any other entity. In any effort to decelerate or maintain the population growth rate, the Church is also against any coercion (like dictating the number of children a couple can have, and coercing people to be sterilized), while it bats for the necessity of providing full information to couples regarding the means used.

Another misconception is that the Church is against responsible parenthood and family planning, and wants people to multiply without any restraint. The truth is, the Church advocates responsible parenthood. The Church also advocates family planning as an exercise of responsible parenthood. The Church indeed teaches that parents should strive to generously bring children into the world, but also that they should strive to bring into the world only those children whom they can raise up in a human way. According to the Church’s view, it would be irresponsible for couples to beget children without any thought on whether they can educate them.

Again, many people think that the Church is against sex education. In reality, the Church wants sex education for her children. But the Church wants sex education to be given in an appropriate way, reserving to parents the first right to give sex education to their children. The Church also wants sex education to be given according to the appropriate age of the children and with a corresponding education in values.

One thing many people find hard to understand is the Church’s insistence that couples should use only natural family planning. The Church’s stand is based on two convictions: 1) that in the matter of birth control, what is important is not only the purpose but the means used to attain the purpose. There must be not only a morality of purpose but of means; 2) natural family planning, is the only moral means of birth control.

I will discuss in another essay the justification for the Church’s insistence that only the natural method is the only morally allowable method of birth control. What I will explain here is the necessity to consider not only the efficiency but the morality of the means used for birth control. I will try to answer the objection of some people that the other modern means must be allowed because they are easier to use and are more effective and efficient.

In the matter of birth control, the issue of morality is even more important than efficiency. If efficiency is what matters most, then why not use outright abortion or infanticide? Or, better still, why not line up against the wall those who say that we should not be concerned about the morality of means, and then shoot them all to death? That would be a quick way of diminishing the population growth rate. But I am sure that all of the advocates of efficiency of means only would object and would say that that would be immoral. In saying that, however, they would be admitting that it is important to consider the morality of means and not only their efficiency.

Thus, the Catholic bishops are obliged to militate against the provision of House Bill 5043 that “the full range of family planning methods, both natural and modern shall be promoted” (sec. 11), such modern methods being understood to include “hormonal contraceptives, intra-uterine devices, injectables and other allied reproductive health products” (sec. 10). We know that IUDs, pills, the morning after pill, Norplant and Depo-Provera are not only contraceptives but also abortifacients, since they not only prevent fertilization but the implantation of the fertilized ovum. The prevention of the implantation of the fertilized ovum is already a form of abortion, according to prevailing Catholic teaching.

The insistence of the bishops and of the Catholic Church on the morality of means is only an insistence that we safeguard our humanity in what we do, and especially in the matter of family planning. It will not matter much that we become more economically prosperous if in the process we devalue ourselves as human beings.

For us, pagpapakatao (growth in humanity) should come first, and should not be sacrificed especially in the matter of pagdadalang-tao (bearing children).

Facts and fallacies in the population debate

By John J. Carroll, S.J.
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:36:00 09/05/2008

Perhaps former senator Francisco Tatad should check his facts before rushing into print. In an article criticizing a paper signed by 26 economists of the University of the Philippines (UP) in support of the Reproductive Health Bill, President Ferdinand Marcos’ former minister of public information wrote: “… [T]he economists reportedly claim that 57 percent of Filipino families have nine children or more. The statistic reads like one of those manufactured electoral counts in one of our notoriously crooked elections. It smells.”

The UP paper actually claims no such thing, only that poverty incidence “rises steadily with the number of children to 57 percent for a family of nine children or more.”

Such loose argumentation does not advance the cause of truth, the good of the Filipino people, or the credibility of the Church for which the author seems to be speaking. It may be useful therefore to list down some facts which I believe to be well established and which tend to be obscured in the dust of the ideological battle surrounding the Reproductive Health Bill.

• The Philippine population is hardly “booming” or “runaway.” The birth rate and the natural increase rate (birth rate-death rate) have both been coming down, though not as rapidly as some economists and others would like. The surge in population, which multiplied 10 times over in the 20th century, was not due to a significant increase in the birth rate but to a drop in the death rate made possible by public health measures such as malaria control, clean drinking water and immunization of children.

• Rapid population growth can be either good or bad for an economy. In the United States of the 19th century, a vast continent of immense natural resources benefited immensely from the immigration of Irish and German immigrants who built the railroads, dug the canals and mined the coal to fuel rapid economic development. In the Philippines, on the other hand, and despite what textbooks may say of “vast natural resources,” the forests are gone, the coral reefs are in bad shape, the rivers are dead or dying and millions of tons of precious topsoil have been washed into the sea. To make matters worse, our human resources are underdeveloped due to a disastrously poor public school system. In these circumstances, rapid population growth imposes an additional burden on the economy.

• Rapid population growth alone cannot explain poverty; the latter has many other causes including corruption, oligarchic control of the economy, concentration of income and poor economic policy. But large families among the poor make it more difficult for them to rise out of poverty since expenditures per child on health and education drop radically and systematically as the number of children in a family increases.

• A lower population growth rate would not be a quick fix, however, for the economy. If all Filipinos were to stop having children today, the impact on the school system would not be felt for another seven years or so—when the children not born today would not be starting to go to school!—and the impact on the job market for 15 or 20 years.

• The current decline in the birth rate should not be a reason for complacency among those who oppose contraception, since much of the decline is due precisely to contraception. It might better be seen as a challenge to provide a genuine option especially to the poor, in the form of natural family planning.

• Nor does it mean that the “population problem” will soon be a thing of the past. Even though the average number of children born per woman is decreasing, the large percentage of women in their childbearing years will ensure population growth for generations to come.

• Contraception and abortion: Is there a link and if so what is it? On the one hand, one would intuitively expect that easy availability of contraception especially among the poor would provide an alternative to abortion. On the other hand, there are cases such as the United States in which the use of contraceptives and the rate of abortions have increased together. Here the pro-life people have their hands on an important point: It is a question of values and priorities, of another child or another car, of respect for life and the whole sacred process by which a man and a woman cooperate with the Creator in bringing a new life, a new human person, into being.

• Hence the importance of value formation such as that which is ideally given in courses on natural family planning (NFP). Without that, even NFP can become simply another technique, less expensive than contraception, with no side effects, and effective if used properly.

• Effective usage of NFP is not as simple as popping a pill or having oneself ligated. The “user failure rate” can be high, depending mainly on the motivation of the couple to be faithful to the method. Yet the user failure rate of various contraceptives, including pills, can also be high. And even with a relatively high user failure rate, if the 50 percent of Philippine couples not practicing any form of family planning were to turn to NFP, it would impact significantly on the birth rate. Moreover, NFP has its intrinsic rewards in terms of woman’s empowerment, discipline and family solidarity.

Which reminds us that, behind all of the statistics and arguments, what we are talking about here is, ultimately, life and love.