Category: media

media, priests & abortion

media is plural for mediocre, rene saguisag says in his manila times column on the same day that mark robert b. baldo in a letter to the inquirer editor decries the failure of media to level-up the public debate on the RH bill.

A cursory look on the articles printed in this broadsheet shows this to be a recurring theme: luminaries using the infidelities of some Catholic priests in Europe to discredit the Church; some citing the political affiliations of some bishops; and others, presenting flawed accounts of Church history. This is a mistake because no longer do we hear mention of arguments by both parties.

… Media inevitably shape the public debate. I am not talking here about whether the bill should be passed or not, or whether the media should frame it in such a way that it would be passed or not. I am simply talking about how to frame the debate in such a way that it would stimulate productive discussion rather than a stirring drama about a declining institution in Philippine society.

indeed, na-sidetrack, nagpa-sidetrack, na lang ang media sa rizal vs. damaso drama ni carlos celdran.   easier naman talaga to go with the flow, kahit paatras, than to move on, against the tide, to the more difficult formidable challenging task of helping along the RH discourse toward a clear resolution.

in Some issues about the RH bills fr. joaquin bernas writes:

When does human life begin? We probably are all agreed that man must not destroy human life. Our Constitution protects life “from conception.” There is some indication in the deliberations of the 1987 Constitution Commission that this means “from fertilization.” But there are contrary views. Who will decide which view is correct?

granted, for the sake of no-argument, that the philippine constitution means “from fertilization” and that congress will so concur, what then?   logically, it should mean the end of all debate because as with the natural family planning method (no sex during ovulation), with artificial contraceptives no fertilization happens, which means no life is destroyed, so condoms, pills, and IUDs should be okay-all-right.

and yet and yet and yet, priests and other rabid pro-lifers continue to insist that birth control pills (that prevent ovulation so no egg is produced for sperm to fertilize) are abortifacients.   nakakaloka.   how canyou even begin an intelligent discussion???   for the longest time i couldn’t figure it out.   why the lying.   why the dishonesty.   why the misinformation.   until suddenly it dawned on me, after reading this, still from fr. bernas:

The determination about the beginning of human life will also be relevant to the debate on abortion. Clearly abortion is prohibited and penalized by law. But when does abortion take place? At what stage of the reproductive process will interruption be considered an offense against life? At fertilization or only after implantation? Are there birth control devices or pills which are abortifacient? If so, in what way? There is debate about the abortifacient effect of some birth control means. Who is to settle this debate—Congress? The Courts? Science? the Church? The ralliers? I understand that the various pharmaceutical and medical literature on this are conflictive.

the questions tell me that fr. bernas knows more than he’s telling, much like a parent who has a hard time talking to a teen child about sex because the openness and the info could be misconstrued as license to have sex.   in this case the information, which is most likely new to many many filipino women, rich and poor, young and old, could be misconstrued as license to interrupt the reproductive process by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg, which apparently he equates with abortion.   i totally disagree.

just to make sure i have it right, i emailed my balikbayan brother dr. godofredo “butch” stuart, now based in tiaong, quezon, who is my first resource on contraception.   his response:

REPRO 101

Fertilization occurs when sperm-meets-ovum, 200 to 500 million sperms in the ejaculate, discharged into the vaginal vault, embarking on journey up the vagina, up the cervix. Only less than a thousand survive the swim and make it to the fallopian tube, into the “last lap” of their swim. These sperms have fertilizing capabilities that last only for 72 hours, sometimes 96 hours.

And once a month, normally, one mature egg is released from the ovary, fertilizable only for 24 hours. Into the fallopian tube it begins the journey, where it is met by one of the surviving sperma. So fertilization occurs, resulting in a zygote.

The germinal stage (0 to 2 weeks) begins when the zygote journeys down the fallopian tube to the uterus, reaching the uterus in 4 to 5 days, floating freely in the uterine cavity for several more days, finally adhering to the uterine wall about the 8th day after fertilization. By the 12th the egg is firmly implanted. And by the end of the second week the uterine wall has completely surrounded the newly developing organism.

This is the basic arithmetic on sperm and ovum life spans, and how the implantation happens many days later after fertilization. And how morning-after contraception works in the schemata of the germinal stage and implantation.

check out his website stuartxchange.com where he has a page on emergency post-coital contraception.   between fertilization of the egg and its implantation in the uterus, there’s a 7-day window during which contraceptive pills taken in certain doses effectively prevents implantation, which is how the morning-after pill (banned here) works.

the question is, when a woman resorts to emergency contraception, is that abortion?   i don’t think so.   while it is true that a fertilized egg has life, still it’s NOT A VIABLE LIFE, not until implantation.

DOC BUTCH :  Yes, non-viable until implantation.  Alive, yes, as in in-vitro fertilization, alive in the laboratory milieu, but still needing the uterine implantation to enter a sustaining nutritional environment.

which brings me back to fr. bernas’s questions: when does abortion take place?   answer: certainly not when a woman resorts to emergency contraception “the morning after” sex, because a fertilized egg (if at all there is one) is not yet a viable life-form.   and no, BIRTH CONTROL PILLS ARE NOT ABORTIFACIENTS:  once a fertilized egg has implanted onto the uterine wall, no amount of these pills can dislodge or remove it from the uterine wall.   (only real abortifacients can dislodge, abort, a zygote, but that’s for another blog.)

of course pro-lifers would disagree with me till kingdom come.   but try googling it and you will find that there are as many arguments for fertilization, as there are for implantation, as the beginning of human life.   so fr. bernas asks: who is to settle the debate re the alleged “abortifacient effect of some birth control means” — congress? the courts? science? the church? the ralliers?   answer: NONE OF THE ABOVE.   i say THE WOMAN DECIDES, not the priests or the opus deists.

DOC BUTCH : From opposing ends, it will never be answered or agreed upon. Yes, in the end, it should be the woman’s right, sole and inalienable, unburdened by archaic church edicts and impotent male political will. Too, a daunting responsibility for “educators” with the burdensome task of educating the womenfolk. And how to make the information available and comprehensible to the masa, who still resort to coat-hangers, grapevine pharmaceuticals, and dangerous herbal concoctions.

indeed.   widespread underground procedures kill about 1,000 women each year in this predominantly roman catholic country.

An estimated 560,000 women in the Philippines in 2008 sought abortion involving crude and painful methods such as intense abdominal massages by traditional midwives or inserting catheters into the uterus, said a report by the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights.

which brings me back to the media, which have the power and the means not only to shape the debate but to make available the information and educate the womenfolk, thereby “to change the status quo of high rates of infant mortality, maternal deaths, and abortions. It is a moral imperative that such dehumanizing conditions should not be allowed to continue.”

DOC BUTCH :    Media seems to kowtow to the powers that be.  It seems like institutional fear.  No cojones to challenge the church on such matters.  Or perhaps everyone of note in media went to the same church-sponsored Sex Education 101.  Masyadong malakas ang simbahan.

but is it just fear of excommunication and hellfire,  or is it also a lack of critical thinking,  and not caring enough about the issues that matter?   media is plural for mediocre?   yes, all of the above.

no laws broken, no heads rolling

heard national anti-poverty commission chief joel rocamora in a bbc interview saying that no laws were broken by top officials in the august 23 bus hostages bloodbath.

eight hong kong chinese died needlessly violently in the hands of a mentally unstable discharged policeman yet no laws were broken?

nato reyes points out that in the end what (not who) gets blamed is the government’s crisis manual:

Malacanang has kept accountability for the August 23 incident at the lower levels of government. It has invoked the vague provisions of a government crisis manual as a convenient excuse for the shortcomings and incompetence of the national leadership. The section of the IIRC report on National or Local Crisis says:

It appeared that at no point was the elevation to the status as a national crisis considered even while practically all the hostages were foreign nationals and even while representatives from foreign embassies or consular offices were already involved.

The Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR) on Crisis Situations does not have clear parameters on when, or under what circumstances, should a crisis be elevated to national status.

Aquino’s repeated reference to the vague provisions of the government manual has served as a firewall for the national leadership. Malacanang insists that since there are no guidelines which will allow them to assume command of a particular crisis, they cannot be blamed for anything. It’s like saying that it is the manual’s fault, not theirs.

as for command responsibility, here’s what malacanang’s review of the iirc report says under III. Applicable laws, rules and regulations, and jurisprudence:

2. A person may be held criminally liable only for his own actions or omissions. However, he may be held administratively or civilly liable for the consequences of the actions or omission of his subordinates or wards when the principle of command responsibility and the rules/laws on subsidiary, solidary and vicarious liability under the Revised Penal Code and the Civil Code are applicable.

3. In Rubrico v. Arroyo (G.R. No. 183871, February 18, 2010), the Supreme Court defines Command Responsibility as “the responsibility of commanders for crimes committed by subordinate members of the armed forces or other person subject to their control in international wars or domestic conflict.” While there are several bills on command responsibility, there is still no law that provides for criminal liability under that doctrine.

there we go.   no law that provides for criminal liability for command irresponsibility.

so the president is not liable (even if he took responsibility for the fiasco some 10 days later) , nor usec puno, nor then pnp chief versoza.   if we took them to court, their lawyers would get them off easily.   waste of time and money, ika nga ni presidente.

yesterday the president also again explained why neither he nor his bff dilg usec puno showed up and took charge: the hostage-taker might have escalated his demands if faced with such high officials.   i wonder where they got that notion.    has it ever happened before?   meron bang precedent to justify such a fear?   i wonder who he was listening to, who was advising, what was influencing, him that long long afternoon and evening.   i wonder what they were all up to after the oathtaking of, among others, gina lopez and conrado de quiros’ brother…   to surface only deep in the night when the shooting was over.

also i don’t understand why tulfo and rogas got off scot-free, even if vergel santos of the center for media freedom and responsibility is actually happy about it.   i heard an unapologetic maderazo saying again that if they hadn’t done what they did, then we the public would not have known what was going on.   heh.   if they hadn’t done what they did, then mendoza wouldn’t have snapped they way he did and possibly nothing so bloody terrible would have gone down.

at the very least i hoped to see four heads rolling: puno’s, because he was incompetent and unqualified, versoza’s because he didn’t care enough to stay around and stay on top of things, and rogas’s and tulfo’s for agitating mendoza and driving him off the edge.   unfortunately the president loves puno and versoza, and coddles media, to a fault.

update:

From Day 1, P-Noy wanted
to save Lim, Puno, Verzosa
by Malou Mangahas

aug 23, vilifying media

I was in San Francisco when I watched this sorry episode. CNN had the story but their thrust was not so much that there was a hostage situation in Manila (incidents like these, unfortunately, frequently happen worldwide), but that “the whole incident was being broadcast live on television,” followed by a recital of CNN guidelines and how they have an editor in the newsroom who monitors and EDITS what they get. This person edited the ABS-CBN coverage and only showed the bus at a distance.

Media in this country has become recidivist when it comes to how they deliver the bad news. They almostmake it worse. Valdes was right: they are vilifying themselves.

read the whole essay by Ma. Isabel Ongpin

Truth and consequence

Luis V. Teodoro

Congressional hearings are held “in aid of legislation,” and the leading members of the Senate committee on public information and mass media, and the committee on public services, made it clear last Tuesday that they did not call the heads of the news sections of TV networks ABS-CBN, GMA7, and TV5 just to pass the time.

Sen. Joker Arroyo, who used to defend journalists from government harassment during the martial law period, warned that the Senate could pass a law to regulate the networks’ coverage of hostage-taking and similar crises if they did not restrain themselves.

The operative word was “restraint.” Despite the lame excuses and the evasions worthy of contortionists, the truth is that television news displayed the exact opposite of it — i.e., the frenzy of predators — when covering the hostage-taking crisis at Manila’s Rizal Park last August 23.

With reckless disregard for the lives of the hostages, most of the TV and radio reporters onsite violated not only some of the conditions of their stations’ franchises as well as the existing guidelines of the Kapisanan ng Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP — the broadcasters’ association), but also and more appallingly, the most basic rules of common human decency.

One network provided the hostage-takersuch information as the positions of the police snipers and the deployment of the police assault teams. RMN radio interviewed the hostage-taker, in the process enabling him to plead his case to a wider public and gain public sympathy, and ended up mediating between him and the police. All the networks and their affiliate radio stations also broadcast the arrest of the hostage-taker’s brother, and thus contributed to his being provoked into shooting the hostages.

They earlier claimed that the frenzy of their coverage did not contribute to the bloody outcome of the August 23 crisis. But the networks aren’t saying that now. Instead they’ve taken refuge in the argument that they had no choice because the police had not set the limits of media coverage. As for RMN, it is unrepentant and insists that it was “just doing [our] job.” Apparently, doing the human thing as the ethics of journalism demands — preventing further harm, and not risking the lives of people other than themselves — is beyond them, if the race for the ratings and advertising revenues are involved. By abandoning their supposed preference for self-regulation, on the other hand, that excuse also invites government regulation.

But does it really need the government and the police to tell presumably adult, mature individuals that the hostage-taker could have been listening to radio and/or watching television and therefore likely to react to what he’s hearing and seeing? Does it need a set of guidelines in black and white for broadcasters (one of the loudest of whom admitted he’s untrained even for his own job) to realize that they shouldn’t be negotiating with a hostage-taker because they’re not trained for it?

Not that the guidelines for ethical and professional coverage during hostage-taking and similar crises don’t exist. They do, and they’ve been in place for decades. The injunction against covering events live, providing information on police movements, airing interviews with the relatives of hostage-takers, as well as the warning that the media should assume that the hostage-taker has access to TV and radio broadcasts have all been in place for years. So have the internal rules of such models of competent and ethical coverage as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

(Maria Ressa of ABS-CBN earlier took exception to observing those guidelines by reason of “cultural differences” — but later told the Senate committees last Tuesday that “journalism ethics are universal.” Practically the same guidelines are also in the KBP Broadcast Code, which, among others, warns against airing reports on police and troop movements as well as media’s negotiating with hostage-takers.)

Visibly angry, and themselves hardly restrained, Arroyo, Juan Ponce Enrile, and other senators showed little of the fear of the media Arroyo claimed was inhibiting Congress from quickly passing a law to prevent a repetition of the irresponsibility the leading TV networks exhibited last August 23.

But the House of Representatives may yet beat the Senate to it. Without the benefit of any public hearing, Rep. Gabriel Luis Quisumbing has introduced a bill declaring it unlawful “for any media person to report or present publicly the positions, movements and actions…by the members of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) during crisis situations.” The penalty for violations is either imprisonment from six months to six years, a fine of P20,000, or both.

We can all be certain that if this bill reaches the committee and floor levels, the honorable congressmen of the 15th Congress will add to it, as well as suggest amendments to make it even more repressive.

But isn’t this what the networks have really been asking for, their half-hearted expressions of preference for self-regulation as well as their demand that the police tell them where, when, and what to cover constituting an invitation for government intervention and the imposition of that oxymoron, legislated ethics?

Their seeming confusion proceeds from a presumption no one has so far mentioned: it is that they do what they do, and did what they did last August 23, in furtherance, not of the truth they always claim to be for, but of their commercial interests. Those interests dictate a race for scoops and exclusives, or, at least, not to be the only station not to cover an incident, especially one as inherently sensational as a hostage-taking. It makes perverse sense: if government sets the rules, complete with penalties for violators, then everyone should follow, with no one having an edge over the others.

And that is why, ladies and gentlemen of the supposedly free media community of the Philippines, as the demands of both government and the public for media regulation grow louder and louder, the TV networks are silently but surely supporting them — if not in speech, certainly in such deeds as the way they covered the hostage-taking crisis of August 23rd. They’re asking for it, and in the process undermining the freedom of ALL the media including print, whose coverage of the same event was, lest we forget, incomparably more responsible and restrained.