While many young people who don’t even understand the Reproductive Health (RH) bill trumpet the message that the country’s youth need the measure, one recent university graduate has joined other students in declaring their opposition to the bill, saying it does not meet the needs of the youth for a brighter future.
“The RH Bill will dim that brighter future. In YUP! we anchor our vision for the youth on virtues. The RH Bill does not promote virtue but rather offers a technique precisely to get around not being able to exercise virtues,” said Mark Robert Baldo, spokesperson of Youth United for Life (YUP!) and a recent university graduate.
“Where the youth have to exercise temperance toward sex, the RH Bill implicitly provides a way for the youth to neglect the practice of that virtue but supposedly get away with the consequences. Emphasis on ‘supposedly,’ for there are more dire consequences than teenage pregnancy which escape our often narrow purview.”
According to an article in the Filipinos for Life website, Baldo, who recently graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of the Philippines Diliman with a degree in B.S. Political Science, brushes off the notion that advocating an RH law is necessarily synonymous with critical thinking. In fact, given the remarkable flow of misinformation going around nowadays as regards the RH issue, Baldo’s observation that many simply “go with the flow” is hardly surprising.
Baldo points out that “It is not categorical that if I support the RH bill I am intelligent or if I do not support it I am stupid, and vice versa. But I can say that I sense a certain non-thinking among the youth I have encountered. By default, by pressure, by supposedly ‘common sense,’ they think the RH Bill is worthy of support.”
“Those I have mentioned are generally un-meditated, non-rational components in choosing a stand,” he continued.
“They do not involve thinking for one’s self. Indeed, in the academic life, when we take something to be given or common sense, that is usually a signal that we may be gravely mistaken and [are] just going with the flow.” (CBCP for Life)
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