RP population policy debate to heat up

RP population policy debate to heat up

MANILA (Reuter): The Roman Catholic church in the Philippines is mounting a fresh campaign against the government's population control program.

Manila's archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Sin, yesterday enjoined Catholics to unite on Aug. 14 for a day of fasting and prayer to express "indignation and outrage at the abuses being allowed by the government against the family".

Sin, a powerful figure in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation of 62 million people, is particularly concerned at the government's position at the International Conference on Population and Development in Egypt in September.

President Fidel Ramos, a Protestant, has vigorously backed family planning measures in support of the government's plan to curb population growth. The Catholic Church bans artificial contraception.

In an open letter to parents, Sin warned: "For it is now clear that global forces, backed by the wealth of powerful nations, are out to destroy the family by first destroying our children.

"Our children are being conditioned systematically to adopt a contraceptive mentality," he said.

"Now they are being brainwashed to accept as normal, attractive and even glamorous certain unnatural, abnormal and perverse sexual relationships such as homosexuality, lesbianism, incest, sodomy, oral sex, contraception, sterilization and abortion," Sin said.

Sin earlier this month lashed at government plans to use cartoon videos to teach children sex education.

Caught in the middle of the debate, Filipino women's groups are demanding to be heard.

"Respect for women's self-determination has been systematically excluded in the population policies and programs of the government and in the discourse of the church in the Philippines," a joint statement by five womens's rights groups said.

"Neither state, through its population policy, nor the church or the Vatican, through its religious/moral force on 85 percent of the Filipino Catholic community, should be allowed to exercise any influence to decide or to intervene on women's lives and their bodies," it said.