Filipino Family Planning Bill Faces Opposition from Catholic Leadership

Time: Philippines: Hope, Finally, for a Family-Planning Law, by Emily Rauhala:

It was an awkward situation: There I was, stuck in a windowless conference room, talking sex with a Catholic priest. Not just any priest — an Archbishop, sitting under a portrait of the Pope.

It was April 2008, and His Excellency Paciano Aniceto and I had met in Manila to discuss his position on contraception. As a member of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, Aniceto has been a prominent anticondom campaigner, denouncing all forms of "artificial" contraception despite demand from the people and a population boom that the national economy can't handle. Like most Catholic leaders in the Philippines, he says birth control pills and condoms are "antilife" and argues that contraception is a gateway to abortion. Both are claims his allies are likely to trot out this week as the Philippines — and much of the world — considers the Pope's comment that condoms may be used, in rare circumstances, to stop the spread of HIV but should not be used as birth control. . . .