STATE SHOULD PROMOTE RESPONSIBLE SEX,
NOT SAFE SEX -- PIMENTEL

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Q. Pimentel, Jr. (PDP Laban) has objected to the use of the term "safe sex" in the Reproductive Health Bill being deliberated in the Senate because it could loosen morals among minors and send the wrong message that the State is promoting promiscuity among adults.

"Safe sex implies that copulation by anyone with anyone at anytime is alright - a terribly blighted view of what sex is meant to be," Pimentel said.

He said the State should promote "responsible sex." instead of safe sex, as an activity that is primarily engaged in by married couple.

"In short, the law should promote responsible sex, not safe sex; procreation, instead of reproduction and equal relations of women and men - not between or among artificially created genders - in maters of sex," the senator said.

Safe sex, he added, may now be said to include, among its many evils, "adulterous communications free from the discovery by suspicious spouses."

Pimentel criticized the Reproductive Health Bill, as crafted in a Senate committee report, for suggesting that pregnancy is like a plague that should be avoided at all costs by the use of contraceptive medicines, drugs, machines, devices or methods of treatment.

"If the contraceptives fail to prevent pregnancy and a baby results from a couple's sex acts, the child is then tagged as 'unwanted,' a most painful label ever devised by man," the senator from Mindanao said.

"If the baby is unwanted, the next 'logical' step for the parents to take is get rid of it. The dreaded 'A' word follows in the mind even if it is not done. But if thought is father to the act, abortion cannot be far behind."

Pimentel said the inventor of the birth control pill, Carl Djerassi, recently criticized in an Austrian paper, Der Standard, the attitude of young people wanting to have sex but not children.

"Without mentioning it, Djerassi knows that from his pills all sorts of illnesses have sprung, including high blood pressure, decreased libido, thrombosis, cancer and other sexually transmitted diseases: the inevitable adverse results of sex separated from procreation."