WHY do I love us? Why do I love my country so much as to amount to a passion, albeit laced with frequent insults.
One reason is that we Filipinos don’t agonize over problems; we take them out.
The other is that we are never divided over issues like the one that has split Paraguay. Should a 10-year-old girl, who was raped and impregnated by her stepdad, get an abortion?
In Paraguay the debate circles around the issue whether the risk of giving birth to the health of a 10-year-old is such as to justify a legal abortion—or not. Msgr. Claudio Gimenez, president of the episcopal conference who needs to be raped, said, “Some want to legalize abortion, the killing of an innocent still in a period of gestation.”
Oooohhhh, so the church wants the baby to be born first before it is thrown into a garbage can. The monsignor is, of course, an idiot. Nobody wants to legalize abortion; abortion is legal in Paraguay when giving birth poses a grave risk to the mother’s life. The question is, if such a grave risk exists.
As the debate goes on, the risk increases. Thus, five months into the debate as the girl’s belly got bigger and bigger, the health minister, herself an idiot, said the girl is fine; she should give birth because the baby is now viable. As if the issue was whether to abort her when the fetus could not live outside the womb or to wait until it could, and then not to abort her naturally.
Meanwhile, Paraguayan cops arrested her stepdad for raping her and her natural mother for letting him.
In our country, the 10-year-old would have gotten an abortion the moment it was discovered she was pregnant; any doctor would do it; if he couldn’t, he’d find one who would; and if it was discovered, no one would prosecute the doctor; the law will leave him be. The main consideration would be the risk to her mental health, if she ends up a mother at 10.
Meanwhile, her stepdad would be shot for trying to grab the gun of an officer with his hands tied behind his back, and it is not unlikely that the girl’s natural mother will meet an untimely end.
Now, arguably this summary practice, this habit of ours to just bury our problems rather than our heads in the sand, won’t stand moral scrutiny. I should know. I am, perhaps, the only Filipino to have studied directly under the leading American moral and legal philosopher, John Rawls, at Harvard’s Emerson Hall.
But morals have to do with what ought to be; not with what already is: in this case what is, is a dead rapist. In law, we’d set aside the issue as “mute” and academic, which is to say something one could talk about when there’s nothing that can be done about it—like the weather—so it’s best just to let it pass as done, but best left unmentioned.