Time for Courage

By: Walden Bello • Inquirer.net

For about 17 months now, ever since it was introduced in the House of Representatives’ Committee on Population at the beginning of the 15th Congress in August 2010, the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill has been the subject of intense debate.  This intensified after the bill passed the Committee on January 31 this year and entered into plenary deliberation.

The only other legislative items to rival the RH bill in terms of the intensity of debate provoked were the impeachment of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez and the budget deliberations.  As 2011 comes to a close, the RH Bill has been debated ad nauseam.

One wishes that one could characterize the debate as a laudable exercise in democracy.  It has become, instead, an exercise on how to use parliamentary procedures to derail democracy.   The same questions have been repeatedly raised by the anti-RH interpellators, and it has become increasingly clear that, not having the votes to prevent the passage of the bill in the House, they have resorted to the equivalent of a filibuster to delay the bill from coming to a vote on the floor.

Over 40 members had themselves listed to interpellate, but over the last eight months, only about 12 have taken the podium, some repeatedly and for hours on end, with the obvious intent of either preventing a vote or delaying it till we come closer to the 2013 elections, when the specter of  electoral retribution by the Catholic Church hierarchy against RH supporters can be used to scare fainthearted supports from voting for the measure.

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