Where’s mercy?

IHAD started on another topic when I realized this column is coming out on Dec. 28, a day the Catholic Church dedicates to the children that Herod killed to protect his throne from Jesus.

Hence, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I thought I would write on behalf of the many poor unborn and newly born babies and their mothers who will die in the meantime that the Reproductive Health Law (RHL) is prevented from being implemented by the stiff legal opposition of Catholic bishops and the sweet time the Supreme Court is taking to decide on the issue.

It is not looking like the comfortable- living celibate leaders of the Catholic Church and the equally comfortable (with their families) justices of the Supreme Court are going to gift poor Filipino women and children with the mercy of the benefits of the RHL. The former has remained unmercifully steadfast in stopping its implementation while the latter have just as insensitively warmed their fat butts sitting on the issue.

If my hunch is right, they will probably continue to sit on it because neither group is likely to accept responsibility for the many more deaths of unborn (many through crude illegal abortions) and newly born babies and their mothers, most of them from illness and malnutrition, which is the lot of the poor.

Catholic bishops, with extremely rare exceptions, see the problem exclusively as moral and refuse to accept scientific facts like abortions happening beginning with the fifth pregnancy of extremely poor mothers. They simply blame the deaths of today’s Holy Innocents on the lack of an informed conscience on the part of the poor mothers, conveniently forgetting that they are supposed to form that conscience in the first place.

The justices, on the other hand, see the problem as legal and blame the deaths on the poor mothers’ violation of the law when they resort to crude and often deadly illegal methods to abort unaffordable pregnancies they do not know how to prevent safely.

I wonder if it ever occurs to them to accept responsibility for the deaths of children and mothers that happen while they delay and try to stop the implementation of the RHL. Why can’t they see the many lives (of poor babies and their mothers) that could have been saved if they were already allowed access to the professional health services of the RHL?

Where is the mercy (respect for life?) that Catholic bishops are enjoining the faithful to give to the needy when they allow so many poor babies and mothers to die with their stone-hearted opposition to RHL? And where is more of the law that the Supreme Court is supposed to give to mothers who have less in life and cannot afford the reproductive health services rich educated women routinely avail of?