The move towards respecting life from the moment of conception is not limited to the US. In the United Kingdom, a growing number of doctors are refusing to perform abortions for ethical reasons. As reported by Zenit International News Agency, there are fewer doctors in public clinics willing to perform abortions. Hospitals are referring those seeking abortions to private clinics. For this reason, the National Health Service, which funds four out of five abortions in Britain, is struggling to cope with the bill.

Julia Millington of the London-based ProLife Alliance said that the news of fewer abortions at public clinics is certainly welcomed. In a press statement, Millington added: "We have been hearing for some time now that young doctors, in particular, do not want to work in this field. Those choosing to go into medicine presumably do so because they want to cure sickness and disease, not end the lives of innocent human beings." Such a positive attitude of the young professionals is evidence that there is still a natural law inscribed in the conscience of every thinking human being which makes him recoil instinctively from murdering babies in the wombs of their mothers.

Things are also looking up in the World Bank, thanks to a US lobby to keep out abortion rights from the Bank’s development strategies. A battle broke out recently at the World Bank, with Europeans fighting to keep "reproductive health services" and abortion in one of the bank’s development strategies over repeated US objections. World Bank representatives from France, Germany, Italy, and Norway fought to keep out language proposed by US representative Whitney Devevoise during discussions on the bank’s strategy for Health, Nutrition and Population Results.

Implementing the Bush pro-life policy, the US representatives in the World Bank objected to language on "reproductive health services, including abortions." Any one with a bit of common sense knows that the phrase "reproductive health services" is the Trojan horse for abortion. That is why, Filipino legislators should always be alerted that any bill containing the phrase "reproductive health services" should be rejected, because its tacit inclusion of abortion completely goes against the Philippine Constitution, which mandates that the State should protect both the lives of the baby and the mother from conception. The US representatives were insisting that the phrase "reproductive health services" be replaced by "age appropriate access to sexual and reproductive health care."

As expected, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) launched an e-mail campaign to support the abortion language and challenge the US position. Aimed at Germany’s Eckhard Deutscher, chair of the World Bank’s board of directors, IPPF called for "the inclusion of access to reproductive health services and sexual and reproductive rights language." While the term "reproductive health services" has never been defined by the General Assembly to include abortion, UN agencies, treaty bodies and powerful NGOS like IPPF continue to misinterpret the term to include abortion.

In a recent white paper written by Andrew Essig of De Sales University in the US, the World Bank is criticized for supporting radical family planning and population control since the 1960s. Professor Essig shows that the population control programs supported by the World Bank have actually hampered economic development in poor countries. According to Essig, the bank was "founded with high hope" to relieve the suffering and misery of war. Unfortunately, for some suffering populations targeted for these aggressive control programs, more sickness and misery have resulted, not less. These population programs have no real economic benefit to show. As in now happening in China, Vietnam and India, among others, benefits to the poor come from market-oriented policies, significant investments in infrastructures and massive spending on public education and not from population programs. In fact, the one-child policy in China has backfired and is inevitably causing this country of l.3 billion people to suffer from a rapidly aging population before attaining economic development. China will be the first country in the world to grow old before becoming rich.

These recent developments in the area of population policy should serve as a lesson to Filipinos. Let us be vigilant against any attempt of the newly elected Congress, especially emanating from the Senate, to ram down our throats any legislation that promotes family planning and population management. All our resources and efforts should be focused on such positive solutions to poverty as agricultural and countryside development, enhancing the quality of public education, granting the poor access to credit and fostering the growth of small and mediumscale enterprises. Limiting the family sizes, especially in the huge farming sector, may actually backfire and cause a significant drop in production because of the critical role of labor in the growth of income in most developing economies. For comments, my e-mail address is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.