Sex vs God in the Philippines
By Jennee Grace U Rubrico
MANILA - Armin Luistro is embroiled in a fierce debate between church and
state. As the Philippines education secretary, it's his job to steer government
plans to introduce sex education into elementary and high schools in the
predominantly Catholic nation.
Since announcing last month that he planned to review the program, Luistro, a
member of the De La Salle Brothers - a group of full-time religious educators
who are not priests - has sought to distance himself from a longstanding issue
that is putting politically powerful church leaders at loggerheads with the
government for the second time in five years, saying it is not his priority.
As in a similar tie-up between the department and the United
Nations Population Fund in 2005 - which was suspended at its pilot stage - the
government again finds itself at odds with the politically powerful Catholic
Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), which wields enormous influence,
including the formulation of national policies. While Luistro has yet to decide
on the future of the program, he has met with church leaders, whose stance on
the issue is clear.
"The position of the CBCP even before is that it [sex education] should be left
to parents, especially if we are talking about children who are underage," CBCP
spokesman Pedro Quitorio III said.
Spearheaded by the Education Department, the government's initiative aims to
teach students about health, wellness, values and character development through
modules that include discussions on the human reproductive system, parts of the
body and puberty. As planned by the previous Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
administration, sex education is to be integrated in subjects including
geography, history and civics and mathematics, with the church's position on
pre-marital sex included alongside data on pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy
and sexually transmitted infections.
In a memorandum detailing the focus of the earlier program, the Education
Department stressed the need for sex education by pointing out that 71.1% of
young females and 35.7% of young males reported contracting genital diseases.
It had also noted a 5% rise in early unprotected sex between 1994 and 2002, as
well as a lack of adequate knowledge among adolescents to prevent unwanted
pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
To address those matters, the Education Department had pushed for "more
specific and focused topics", including safe motherhood, fertility awareness,
misconceptions and myths on family planning methods, and adolescent
reproductive health, and for parent-child counseling. The revived program was
scheduled to be pilot tested this year in 79 public secondary schools and eight
elementary schools across the country.
The church is not without its backers since about 82% of country's 90 million
people are Roman Catholic. The Education Department now faces a lawsuit filed
on behalf of 30 parents who oppose the sex education plan for allegedly
promoting “contraceptive imperialism” that assaults Christian sensibilities and
values.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a political force that claims to be
fighting for the right of Muslims in the Philippines, has also joined the fray.
"This is like preparing the child to be competitive for the next world of sex,"
said Sheikh Muhammad Muntassir, head of the MILF Da'wah committee, who also
added that the policy was "hastily designed" and did not consider child
psychology.
The Education Department has for the last month been firefighting, giving out
interviews and issuing press statements to defend the program. In an attempt to
manage the backlash, former education secretary Mona Valisno clarified that
"classroom discussions on sex education [are] not about the sex act but on the
science of reproduction, physical care and hygiene, correct values and the
norms of inter-personal relationships to avoid pre-marital sex and teenage
pregnancy.
"Our role here is to educate our young people on issues that directly affect
them and empower them to make informed choices and decisions," Valisno said,
adding the modules were prepared by psychologists "to ensure that specific
topics for discussions will be made in the appropriate year levels".
She admitted, however, that it would be up to the new administration to decide
on the implementation or scrapping of the contested project. Many take a
pragmatic stance, citing the dismal results of the country's population control
drive to argue their point. Now the twelfth-most populous country in the world,
the Philippines has a population that grows at a rate of 1.96% per year.
Of its 90 million people, 40% are aged 14 years old and below. East Timor is
the only Southeast Asian country that has a faster population growth rate, at
2.03%. Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, has a population
growth rate of 1.14% per year, while China and India, the two most populous
countries in the world, see their population grow yearly by 0.66% and 1.55%
respectively.
"Personally, this is not a moral issue. Whether we should follow the church's
teaching, I don't agree. The situation is that the country needs to manage its
population," said Donald Dee, vice chairman of the Philippine Chamber of
Commerce and Industry, the country's largest business organization. "But when
and how sex education should be taught is something that we leave to the child
psychology experts."
Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Institute of Political and Electoral
Reform, notes that population growth control is paramount, as a runaway
population puts the country at risk of running out of resources.
"Having a big population has some advantages, like having a big labor pool, but
there's a possibility that we would run out of food to feed our people," he
said.
He raised the possibility that the name - the Adolescent Reproductive Health
program - and approach of the initiative may have contributed to the conflict
between the church and government. While acknowledging that the church as an
institution was not likely to change its position, Casiple said he still
believed that the program had a good chance of survival.
Luistro's move to review the program, he said, would open up discussion and
debate. He added that even within the church, the sex education initiative
enjoyed some support.
"The beauty of having a cabinet [in government] is that issues can be discussed
and resolved by consensus. The country needs to manage its population, and most
likely, the [government's position] will be leaning towards reproductive
health, including sex education," he said.
Jennee Grace U Rubrico has been a journalist for over 10 years.
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