MIRRIAM INVOKES U.S. LAWS IN SUPPORT OF RH BILL, THE SAME LAWS THAT SUPPORTED ABORTION by Zoe Vidal

Quo vadis?  Where are you going, Miriam?

Miriam cites US jurisprudence to argue for the passage of the RH Bill, revealing that it is her intention to put us along the contraception-to-abortion track followed by America.  How crazy is that?  Here's the irony:  backed by her own authority as an expert in the interpretation of law, she herself demonstrates that the RH Bill is in fact what the pro-lfie movement has always suspected: a gateway to abortion.  Perhaps unwittingly, she is showing the public where the Philippine society will end up if the RH Bill is passed.

Miriam quotes Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).  The case involved a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives. By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on the grounds that it violated the "right to marital privacy".  What Miriam did not mention was how Griswold was followed-up eight years later with Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), which provided the legal basis for abortion-on-demand in America.  In Roe, the Court ruled that a woman's choice to have an abortion  was protected as a private decision between her and her doctor.  The Supreme Court effectively overturned individual states' laws against abortion by ruling them unconstitutional.  Since Griswold, the US Supreme Court has cited the right to privacy in other rulings.  The Griswold line of cases remains controversial, and has drawn accusations of "judicial activism".

The Griswold to Roe sequence demonstrates how even at the highest levels of jurisprudence, abortion follows contraception as night follows day.  Moreover, you may notice in the same sequence, a movement from the destruction of marriage to the destruction of human life.  The evidence for these two consequences is historical.  Contraception and abortion are related as cause is to effect.  You cannot accept contraception and pretend abortion will not happen.

The opinion on Roe was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, who declared that abortion is a "fundamental right" under the U.S. Constitution and substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.  Writing for the 7-2 Court, Justice Blackmun held that abortion is a fundamental right because it falls under the "penumbra" of the right to privacy.  Roe v. Wade provided reinforcement for cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut and Lawrence v. Texas, all of which set up spheres of personal activity which states cannot regulate without "good cause."   It was thus, that the deaths of millions of unborn Americans was based not on legislation by by judicial action, and that judicial action was based on a "penumbra" -- a partial and vague shadow! -- of the constitutional right to privacy.  Justice Blackmun had forced the issue by conjuring a "ghost" of the right to privacy.

Against the error of placing privacy as the supreme right, we should invoke the doctrine that there exists a hierarchy of rights, and that the Right to Life is prior and superior to the Right to Privacy.  All other rights are subject and subsequent to the Right to Life.  This argument was recognized and accepted by the Philippine Constitutional Commission of 1986, and it is the sense in which the Philippine Constitution enshrines the equal protection of mother and unborn (Ref. Article II, Sec.12).  The US Constitution is NOT the Philippine Constitution.  The Philippine Constitution is pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, and pro-poor -- this was the tag-line during the 1987 referendum by which the Filipino people overwhelmingly approved what was then known as the "Cory" Constitution.  Using Miriam's US jurisprudential arguments, the implication is that the protection of the unborn in the Philippine Constitution should be aborted, presumably via charter change.

When legislation is divorced from sociology and historical facts, the ensuing laws can lead -- as they have led -- entire nations to suffer the very same pitfalls that other nations have experienced.  Miriam is living inside her head and inside her law books, narrowing down her vision into the arguments presented by the cabal of foreign interest groups and dummy NGOs (PLCPD, FFPD, etc) supported by USAID and UNFPA, and the big pharmaceuticals lurking behind the controversy.  They have co-opted the academe, medical professionals, the DOH, and the presidency itself, turning the RH machinery into a kind of Goliath that now challenges what could be the last nation with an actively Christian/Catholic majority.

Here's another irony:
Those who advocate "absolute freedom" will be
absolutely blinded by the kind of freedom they espouse.