How I see the RH Bill

Critics believe the RH Bill was just to provide free condoms and contraceptives to just anyone. Or as a tool to further other causes, such as abortion. However, I feel these to be untrue.

Based on what Beth Angsioco, the original author of the RH Bill, said to my colleague Orion Dumdum, one of the problems of society is women getting pregnant when they are in poor health and are economically poor. They develop birth complications, get rushed to the hospitals, often government hospitals, and die. It's reported that there's so much of this; I'll get figures later. State funding is used to to try and save these would-be mother's lives. But it would have been cheaper and with a greater chance of survival if they instead used contraceptives and never got pregnant.

Now some say, why can't these women just refuse sex with their husbands? Be frigid, in order to avoid complications?

Because if they do, their husbands will beat them up. Even if they run away, it's likely that the husband will find them, or someone may turn her over to her abusive husband. Philippine society is friendlier to the abusive men than to the abused women. A sad fact, so it's hard for women to avoid sex. Even possible is that they are being raped by their husbands (or other men in the village), being forced to have sex. And not every woman can be a Lorena Bobbitt or husband killer (perhaps none at all?).

So the alternative is that the poor, sickly wife goes to the health center and takes a contraceptive, so that when she is forced to have sex, she has less chance of getting pregnant and developing complications that could be fatal. She does this of course without her husband knowing it, provided that the husband is the abusive type.

Now I know what the RH Bill is for.

It's to give women a fighting chance against the abuses of men.

It's not perfect, not the only way to fight against these abuses... but it at least gives the chance to women resist the effects of a husband's (or partner's, or whatever man's) abuse, and save more money for the government (and taxpayers) in the end.