Biased

Jeers to The Manila Times for a biased Easter Sunday special issue highlighting only the Church position on the Reproductive Health (RH) bill.

“Today, Easter Sunday, we purposely offer this special report on the proposed Reproductive Health bill,” the paper’s editor in chief wrote in the paper’s April 24 front page. “We believe it is right and just to dwell today on the Catholic Church’s—and the natural-law guided—assessment of the RH (reproductive health) bill. For that pending bill proposes an anti-life, morally neutral and unjust conviction about human sexuality, fertility and reproduction—the very opposite of the culture of life that Easter commemorates.”

“We think the CBCP pastoral letter and the summary of reasons against the bill have not been given enough exposure in the most widely circulated media. And that the Catholic position has been given short shrift by most of the leading broadcast commentators,” the editor in chief added.

The main article was written by former senator and Opus Dei devotee Francisco Tatad, who provided his legal and moral objections to the bill. “The real purpose of the bill is to prescribe and promote universal birth control for all married couples through an official program funded and run by the state and all its agencies and instrumentalities,” said the former Marcos era Minister of Information (“On the reproductive health bill: The making of an unjust law”) The paper didn’t disclose that Tatad is a prominent member of Opus Dei.

The second article was a pastoral letter of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) stating the Catholic Church’s well-publicized opposition to the bill.

By providing only one side of the argument on the RH bill, the Times missed a chance to educate its readers on the views of each side so that they could arrive at informed opinions on their own.

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