sotto self-destructs #RH bill

the senate should shut sotto up.  he has become a national embarrassment.  not only does he plagiarize bloggers and in the next breath disparage their work, his discourse vs. the RH bill also takes the low low ground, thanks to his incompetent staff, whose asinine research (include bad writing na rin) he takes for, and peddles as, gospel truth.  and this is the last straw: the punchline kumbaga, of his turno en contra part II:

Also in a report prepared for the Royal Commission on Population in Great Britain found that the incidence of induced abortion as a percentage of all pregnancies was nine times higher for women using contraceptives than for women not using birth control.

here is the original material from The Truth Of Contraceptives blog:

In Great Britain, in 1949, a report prepared for the Royal Commission on Population found that the incidence of induced abortion as a percentage of all pregnancies was nine times higher for women using contraceptives than for women not using birth control. [emphasis mine]

note that sotto’s press release does not enclose in quotes or attribute most of the sentence that is clearly lifted, copied, from the blog.  note, too, that “in 1949” was deleted, omitted, deliberately i would think, because it would have dated the “nine times higher” stats.  but using that data at all to convince pro-RH senators that contraceptives induce abortion was the most monstrous mistake of all.

the Pill was approved only in 1960.  what contraceptives were being used in 1949?  i googled “history of birth control” (which he or his staff should have done, too) and found this blog: MedicineNet.com.

Before the Industrial Revolution, birth control devices in America relied largely on condoms for men — fashioned from linen or from animal intestines — and on douches made for and by women from common household ingredients. Abortion-inducing herbs such as savin and pennyroyal also were used, as were pessaries — substances or devices inserted into the vagina to block or kill sperm.

The invention of rubber vulcanization in 1839 soon led to the beginnings of a U.S. contraceptive industry producing condoms (now often called “rubbers”), intrauterine devices or IUDs, douching syringes, vaginal sponges, diaphragms and cervical caps (then called “womb veils”), and “male caps” that covered only the tip of the penis. British playwright and essayist George Bernard Shaw called the rubber condom the “greatest invention of the 19th century.”

When these devices were declared illegal, the flourishing trade simply began selling them as “hygiene” products. For example, vaginal sponges were sold to protect women from “germs” instead of sperm. This led to misleading if not downright fraudulent advertising. From 1930 until 1960, the most popular female contraceptive was Lysol disinfectant — advertised as a feminine hygiene product in ads featuring testimonials from prominent European “doctors.” Later investigation by the American Medical Association showed that these experts did not exist.

so there.  hindi lang outdated ang stats, ni hindi birth control pills ang salarin.  what a howler of a screw-up, mr. sotto.  on the senate floor yet.  enough is enough, mr. senators, your time is up.  pass the RH bill, now na!

*

read, too, manuel buencamino’s Sen. Sotto busted for serial plagiarism 
and sarah pope’s On Plagiarism, the Pill, and Presumptuousness 

fudging the facts: sotto’s anti-RH sob story

nakakaiyak naman talaga ang mawalan ng anak.  lalo na kung sanggol, lalo na kung ni hindi mo nahipo o nahawakan o nayakap.  masuwerte pa nga these days ang mga magulang na maysakit ang sanggol mula sa kapanganakan.  hospital nurseries are kinder, allow the parents (in sterile gowns) to touch and even hold their baby, the mother to breastfeed even, and the baby does not have to die without feeling some love, kahit kaunti, kahit paano.

but but but, the senator fudges the facts when he attributes the infant’s birth defect and short lifespan on the contraceptive pills helen was taking at the time she conceived.

makati medical center could prove to the fact na wala silang makita na dahilan na nagkaganoon ang bata kundi dahil nagkocontraceptives yung asawa ko. nabuntis pa rin kahit gumagamit ng contraceptives, that’s why i know. hindi trabaho ito sa akin, personalan ito. …. sabi ng makati medical center namatay dahil sa paggamit ng misis ko ng contraceptives. even her doctor admits to that fact. dra. enverga santos. he was born and died with a weak heart.

methinks the senator is being cavalier with the truth, or what’s fact and what’s not (i wonder what else he might be lying about).  i doubt very strongly that dr. carmen enverga-santos ever admitted to such a thing.  she was my mother’s obstetrician who delivered me in 1949 (she and my parents were friends in medical school), and later she was my ob-gynecologist, too, and my aunts’ and sisters’ and cousins’ and a niece’s, from the 1950s through the ’90s until she retired.  we were all spacing our kids using birth control pills she started prescribing in the ’60s, and none of us had any problems whatsoever.  if she knew there was any danger from the pill, would she have continued to prescribe it for us after helen’s case?

enverga-santos was a highly respected ob-gyn in her time.  i cannot imagine her, or any credible ob-gyn, or the makati medical center, “admitting to the fact” that the cause of the birth defect and death was, unequivocally and categorically, the birth control pills.  the Pill, since its approval by the FDA in may 1960, is “among one of the most carefully studied medications in U.S. history.”  any such danger, any clinically proven connection between the pill and birth defects, would have immediately brought about its absolute withdrawal from the market by the FDA.  read Common Pill Myths.

shared sotto’s sob story with my doctor brother butch and this is what he had to say:

It’s a bit of a stretch, blaming the pills for that. Any details on how long she continued on the pills after conception? Were there problems with other pregnancies? Any medical conditions the mother was being treated for? Too many other causes of birth problems: infections, drugs, smoking, alcohol, etc. When did Enverga give that opinion?

And we always want to point at something recognizable, always looking for answers, but often, it’s unanswerable, buried deep down in the weird complexities of life, the fears, paranoias, dys-emotions that rule some lives, that eventually manifest themselves as physical maladies and defects.

Here’s more on the subject from Mayo Clinic and from the Honor Society of Nursing.

shared sotto’s sob story, too, with my nurse sister nancy, convent bred but pro-RH, who was also under the care of enverga-santos through 3 pregnancies and deliveries:

it was also the good doctor who prescribed the birth control pills i took after giving birth to our first child in 1965. the same birth control pills allowed me to properly space my next 2 pregnancies.

combined (estrogen/progestin) oral contraceptive pills are highly effective when taken religiously at the same hour each day. if one or more tablets are forgotten for more than 12 hours, contraceptive protection is reduced. the rate of effectiveness of birth control pills is dependent on how consistently and correctly it is taken. not to belabor the issue, pero malamang di tama ang inom ni helen.

in a tv interview soon after his tearjerker of a speech, the senator admitted that the real bottom line for him is that he is against the so many billions that will be spent on pills and condoms to be given away for free, money that, all anti-RH people say, the government doesn’t have or, if it can be had, could be used for more urgent needs.  here’s the response to that of Mulat Pinoy, a population awareness initiative supported by the Probe Media Foundation, Inc. and the Philippine Center for Population and Development:

Investing in family planning services will save several billion pesos, which can be used for critical social services.

The latest US and Philippine research show that governments annually spend a minimum of Php 5.5 billion in healthcare costs to address unintended pregnancies and their complications.

By contrast, only Php 2.0-3.5 billion annually is needed to fund a comprehensive range of voluntary family planning services for the entire country, which also results in a more sustainable population to provide for.

so there.  pass the RH bill, now na!  and let’s not vote ever again for, let’s campaign vigorously against, any and all legislators (or their wives husbands brothers sisters sons daughters nieces nephews) who say no to reproductive health.  they can found their own churches instead and still get rich, like brother mike, praise the lord.

garbage in, garbage out #lubak2normal

the president’s been having a bad week, what with 21 areas under a state of calamity, on top of having to make an emergency landing on a flight to tarlac with his pet senatoriables, so maybe to cheer him up, and maybe to distract us, even give us a sense that we’re not totally helpless, here’s what his communications team cooked up: a twitter campaign with the hashtag #lubak2normal, no kidding.  lubak, as in potholes.  the message is, things are back2normal (the “new normal”?) so let’s get the potholes fixed.

Edwin Lacierda ‏@dawende
Nothing is impassable. Help DPWH repair potholes on national roads by tweeting photos/details to @pcdspo w/ hash tag #lubak2normal
6:45 PM – 10 Aug 12 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 

Manuel L. Quezon III ‏@mlq3
Shot through the heart the rain’s to blame you give lubak a bad name! Report potholes to @pcdspo to help DPWH fix. Tweet photo, location…
6:44 PM – 10 Aug 12 via HootSuite6:44 PM – 10 Aug 12 via HootSuite

Abi Valte ‏@Abi_Valte
Lubak stops here. help DPWH repair potholes on national roads by tweeting photos/details to @pcdspo w/ hash tag #lubak2normal
6:25 PM – 10 Aug 12 via TweetDeck 

nothing is impassable, mr. lacierda?  what about the waterways that are. clogged. with. trash?  the rain’s to blame for potholes, mr. quezon?  hindi ba it’s the poor quality of materials?  and lubak stops where exactly, ms. valte?  the buck, i know, stops with the president, but lubaks are the last thing i’d nag the president about at a time like this.

but okay, i get it, nagpapa-witty kayo, nagpapa-cute, but puns are the lowest form of wit, did you know?  and i suppose natuwa naman ang presidente?  good job?  lol?

gross, actually, na nagpapatawa na kayo, e hindi pa tapos ang krisis.  at kahit pa matapos na ang krisis, bakit lubak, na hindi naman deadly, ang poproblemahin, sa halip na basura, which is super-deadly on all sorts of levels?  mas madali kasing solusyunan ang potholes?  mahirap kasing magpatawa tungkol sa basura?

the levity is unseemly, coming from government officials.  show some gravitas naman.  or fake it, at the very least.

habagat blues

yes, it’s wonderful that again, as in ondoy, faceless nameless good-hearted people are pitching in, helping out the government and the red cross in rescue and relief operations for flood victims.  but if, when, this happens again, and again — if indeed this is the “new normal” — volunteer fatigue will surely set in, sooner rather than later.

thank goodness then that despite claims that various measures undertaken by the government had mitigated flood problems and prevented another flooding on the scale of the one caused by tropical storm “Ondoy” in September 2009 — really? — the president is promising long-term solutions, such as flood control infrastructure and better garbage disposal, even if these seem inadequate to the enormity of the problem that includes denuded forests and silted rivers and waterways clogged with trash or taken over by squatter colonies with nowhere else to go.

here’s hoping this aquino admin welcomes unsolicited advice (something cory didn’t) from well-meaning citizens and, even, pinoys abroad.  check out the comments section of this new york times piece, Rains Flood a Third of Manila Area, Displacing Thousands.  read too alex magno’s Deluge, rigoberto tiglao’s The typhoon curse and what to do about it, and alejandro del rosario’s Looking like a shoal.

meanwhile, i’m glad pag-asa’s color coding has changed from red-green-yellow to red-orange-yellow, better late than never.  red makes sense, as in red alert, danger; in traffic red means stop or else!  yellow too makes sense; in traffic it means caution, prepare to stop or go, change coming.  but green, as in green grass and leaves, chlorophyll and oxygen, is good; in traffic green means go, it’s safe, coast is clear.  as intermediate point between caution and danger, green just did not make sense.   orange is the appropriate color code between yellow and red, between caution and danger.  add a little red to yellow and you get orange.  why didn’t pag-asa see this from the first?  what kind of thinking was going on over there?

as for dost’s project noah, that the aquino admin is so proud of, tina monzon-palma’s talkback episode monday night, when the rains started in earnest, said it all.  project noah is helpful and accessible only to english-speaking and computer-literate government officials with internet connections.  sabi nga ni tina, kailangang i-layman-ize ang language (in both  english and tagalog, may i suggest), at kailangang maiparating sa local government officials on the ground, or else, as in this habagat, it is of no help in getting across warnings of great volumes of rainfall coming.

not that getting the message across will guarantee that people living in high-risk areas would be more willing or eager to leave their homes.  unless they can be assured that their homes and property will be secured against looters, as in provident village (a rare case), there will always be those who will wait until the last minute in the hope that god heeds their prayers and stops the rains before the floods rise too high.

the real solution is to relocate all communities away from high-risk areas.  but apart from the problem of where to relocate them and their expected resistance, there’s this that ondoy and the habagat showed:  what used to be low-risk places that never flooded are now high-risk, too, thanks to climate change and trash dams.  it doesn’t help that goverment mismo is saying it’s the “new normal,” as though to say we’ve got to get used to it, which is of a piece with the president saying that there are no instant solutions.  already you doubt that anything significant is going to get done before the next deluge descends upon us.

i know, there’s nothing instantnoodle about infrastructure, but hey, the dredging of rivers, esteros, canals, etc., the clearing of waterways and underground drainage systems metro wide is something that can be done the moment the weather clears.  and garbage management is something that government can grapple with right away, as in now na.  stop with the spin that we are all complicit in the garbage problem, stop laying it at our doorsteps, because what’s lacking is government initiatives and support for serious solid waste management.  people are willing to segregate their household trash but what’s the use if truckers just dump the biodegradable and non-biodegradable, etc. in the same old overflowing garbage dumps, and worse, into rivers and creeks, and even into manila bay.

it’s more fun in the philippines?  no, just more trashy, and pretentious.