Battleground: Philippines
October 10, 2012 - In late August I did a five-day tour of the Philippines, talking to 30,000 young people and parents about chastity. The tour was timely. The Philippines is under constant, well-funded pressure from the West to promote condoms as the ultimate solution to the problem of STD’s (sexually transmitted diseases) and unplanned pregnancy.
At the center of the battle is the controversial Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, a proposal to allocate funding to the tune of P13.7 billion (Philippine pisos) per year, that’s over $5 billion (U.S. dollars) to make condoms and pills available for free, to offer free “family planning” services to the poor, and to fund compulsory sex education (translation: condom education) for school children and for anyone who applies for a marriage license.
The money behind the bill is sufficient to force a sexual revolution in a nation that is 80 percent Catholic, and where chastity until marriage is still a cultural norm (even if not always followed). High school students there are much like sixth- and seventh-graders here in the United States when it comes to sexual experience. And their parents like it that way!
United Nations’ representatives are also calling for the passage of the RH Bill out of an alleged concern for the women of the Philippines who have a higher maternal mortality rate than other countries in the region. One wonders why proponents of the bill aren’t pushing to put those billions into an underfunded health care system if that’s their true concern…hmmm…
In addition to funding from the Philippine government, the passage of RH promises to open the floodgates of foreign funding for the cash-strapped economy. Millions have already been given to the lobbying effort alone by the U.N., Planned Parenthood and various “charitable” foundations in the United States, to name a few.
One can only imagine how much they’ll commit to the cause if the bill passes!
The problem with all this is that the West should be following the Philippines in the global fight for sexual health, not the other way around.
In 1984 AIDS broke out in the Philippines and in Thailand at the same time. The Philippines, which is more than 80 percent Catholic, promoted abstinence. Thailand promoted condoms. Today, of the 88,574,600 living in the Philippines, 8,700 are infected with HIV/AIDS.
Of the 60,617,200 living in Thailand, approximately 530,000 are infected. That’s more than 60-times higher! And that’s not taking into account the fact that the Philippines has almost 30 million more citizens!
A New York Times article, “Low Rate of AIDS Virus in Philippines is a Puzzle,” quoted the leader of the U.N. theme group on HIV/AIDS for the Philippines as saying, ''It's quite perplexing. …We've been talking about it a lot and frankly, we don't know why it's low.”
Teacher! Pick me! I know the answer! So does the British Medical Journal that accurately noted: “The greater the percentage of Catholics in any country, the lower the level of HIV. If the Catholic Church is promoting a message about HIV in those countries, it seems to be working.”
The Church’s message is chastity. Nothing else works. When condoms are promoted as “safe” and responsible behavior, especially to young, impressionable minds in the classroom, it’s a culture changer. Risk-takers are obviously going to increase. When risk-takers dramatically increase and the risk of HIV infection decreases by 85 percent with condom use, and only 50 percent for a whole host of other STD’s, the end result is worse than the start. That’s not a metaphysical, moral statement. It’s basic math. We see the same problem with condoms and pregnancy. Planned Parenthood researchers had to admit that the leading cause of unplanned pregnancy isn’t a failure to use contraception, but a failure of it to work.
Any extra-marital sexual activity is high-risk behavior. Period. Granted, there is less risk associated with premarital sex when one uses a condom, in terms of contracting STDs, just as robbing a bank is safer with a bulletproof vest, or using heroin is safer with a clean needle, but by no means should any of the above be called “safe” or be promoted as a cultural norm, even with the adequate gear!
But facts don’t matter if they clash with a dogma. And the latex fundamentalists at the U.N. and at Planned Parenthood seem determined to turn a blind eye to the success of the Philippines in the fight against AIDS. They seem equally committed to ignoring the failure of countless nations to win the fight against STD’s and unplanned pregnancies with condoms instead of abstinence.
The condom culture warriors are instead pointing to the relative success of Thailand in recent years, which has lowered new HIV infections (though it’s still astronomically higher than the Philippines) by promoting a 100 percent condom use policy in brothels, to make a case that the Philippines needs to be carpeted with condoms.
It boggles the mind that the “brothel strategy” would be the proposed norm for entire societies. As we’ve seen in the United States over the past few decades, when a high school is treated like a brothel (where it’s assumed that everyone needs to be taught how to use condoms since self control isn’t an option, and free condoms need to be made immediately accessible to everyone) that high school becomes like a brothel! And the end result is worse than before “safe” sex entered the scene.
More than 43,000 people contract an STD every day in the United States. Ten times the number of U.S. citizens are in their graves from AIDS than are on the Vietnam War Memorial. And 40 percent of pregnancies in New York City are aborted … one can assume, unplanned.
And we insist that the Philippines are to follow our example? It is the height of Western arrogance.
Speaker and author Christopher Stefanick is director of youth outreach for YDisciple. Visit him at www.RealLifeCatholic.com. Stefanick’s column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Denver Archdiocese.
