The Philippine Daily Inquirer last Thursday came out with a front page story that detailed the life of a poor woman and her husband struggling to raise their eight children in poverty. I'm not linking the article here because I believe it's one of the worst the Inquirer has ever done, and it puts their motto, "balance news..." in jeopardy. I didn't take up journalism but I recognize a title seeping in bias when I read one. And on the front page with a miserable photo, too.
The reason I brought this up is that it was the core of a discussion my mother and I had that day; she thinking that in cases such as those, the RH bill should be beneficial, and I--very inarticulately--insisting that that woman does not need a freebie ligation but help in the form of better livelihood and education. I learned one thing from Mama that day, too; I learned that for some people, the RH measure is acceptable because it is hard to believe that the poor will ever change.
One of the things we can easily forget is that a person is a person no matter how much he makes, where he lives, how many limbs he's got, or in what stage of life he is. He has a heart, he has a mind, and if you're Christian, you know he is a child of God, therefore that he possesses the same dignity as any of the "better" folks out there.
No one, not even a poor person struggling to raise eight children, deserves to be neutered/spayed, because that is only done to cats and dogs. You do that to cats and dogs because if you don't they just multiply and get galis and spread diseases. People are not like that. People are better than that. We people can be taught, and we have a will, and besides, all of us at some point in our genealogy, were once dirt poor, too.
RH is not a solution to help people in poverty. It is a license to solve poverty by eliminating the poor. Not convinced?
FVR: “I think the philosophy of RH bill is that we must learn to produce quality people in this world instead of producing people who only end up as, say, beggars on the streets, scavengers, or sellers of cheap or prohibited items. This, I think, is the real valid argument in favor of the RH bill.” (May 18, 2011, PDI)
Makes you wonder what "quality people" are.
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BTW, my mom is neither for nor against the bill. And I love her! She is made of win.
7 comments:
N,
That "Salve" article got my goat too. I was actually thinking of writing a long-winded, indignant post to demolish that presumptive, unabashedly biased article. After reading your post, I decide not you. You covered the heart of the matter in a few words, but resoundingly and with mind AND heart. May I repost this?
No prob, Willy! Go ahead :D hehe thanks!!
Great post, Petru!
I'm wondering what "She's made of win" at the end means. Will this be another addition to my vocabulary? ^_^
thanks sunnyday hehe!
"win" is opposite of "fail" :P
epic win, epic fail
made of win, made of fail
WIN!!, FAIIIIIL!!!!
lol
That article was pretty shameless. But, then again, most of the mainstream press seems to have been cheerleading the RH Bill for some time.
Your quotation from Ramos reminds me of what Thomas Malthus--the intellectual grandfather of the zero-growth and population control movements--wrote about the burgeoning poor in his day:
“All children who are born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the death of grown persons… Therefore…we should facilitate…the operations of nature in producing this mortality… [A]bove all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases…”
I also must say that I'm not surprised that Ramos would say such a thing. He was, after all, the president who allowed the IMF-World Bank system of "liberalization" to completely loot the Philippine economy. But no one is talking about that--most instead to prefer to believe that poverty here is caused by "overpopulation".
I wrote an extensive piece addressing these matters at my blog, http://romuloadvocate.wordpress.com - I recommend you check it out if you have the time.
Thanks for dropping by mjrowland!
Bookmarking your blog post :)
This is amazing, and it's simplicity is what makes it so attractive and the message though is despicable, how can we be like that? Never again.
We should come up with a group of like-minded individuals and come up with an alternative development for our country, free for the most part of the most damaging influences that keep perpetuating themselves throughout the develpoment thinking world.
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