Filipinos in costumes protest during a rally for implementation of the Reproductive Health Law hours before the start of arguments on the law in the Supreme Court in Manila yesterday.
MANILA: A relentless Catholic Church campaign to derail a birth control law in the Philippines entered its final phase at the Supreme Court yesterday, with the verdict to have a monumental impact on millions of poor Filipinos.
The court began hearing arguments against a family planning law that President Benigno Aquino, defying intense church pressure, helped steer through parliament late last year.
It is the last legal recourse for the Church, which for more than a decade led resistance to birth control legislation in the mainly Catholic nation.
The Church, which had threatened Aquino and other supporters of the law with excommunication, held prayer vigils, protests and masses near the Supreme Court yesterday. “We ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten and inspire the lawyers who would be arguing for our position... and enlighten the justices of the Supreme Court,” Bishop Gabriel Reyes told a mass at a nearby church.
The law requires government health centres to hand out free condoms and birth control pills, benefiting tens of millions of the country’s poor who would not otherwise have access to them.
More than a quarter of the Philippines’ nearly 100 million people live on the equivalent of 62 cents a day, according to government data. The law also mandates that sex education be taught in schools and that public health workers receive family planning training, while post-abortion medical care was legalised. Proponents say the law will slow the country’s population growth, which is one of the fastest in the world, and reduce the number of mothers dying in childbirth. AFP
