"Filipino voices" are being touted as a force to be reckoned with in the anti-choice opposition against the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). FOCA, a U.S. reproductive choice bill not yet introduced in this congressional session, provides expanded reproductive health care and extends federal protection to women deciding to have an abortion.

Fr. Jerome Magat, a vicar at the St. William of York parish in Stafford, Virginia, and chaplain of the Filipino Family Fund told media that "Filipinos have a tremendous opportunity to be real players in the cause for human life."  Filipino-Americans were present at marches last January 23 before Capitol Hill, to oppose FOCA on the anniversary of Roe v Wade. Magat also stressed that "Abortion is illegal in the Philippines. We come from a country where abortion is taboo and we have a culture that values the family. Filipinos carry all these traits that are so ready-made to be converted to such strong players in the pro-life movement."

Magat obviously equates being pro-life/anti-choice with the position supportive of imprisonment for women who have abortions, as well as engendering a culturally imposed ban on discussing the subject.

President Barack Obama garnered a majority of the American Roman Catholic vote during elections last fall (over 53%), but some reporters have speculated about how Obama got less overall support from Filipino-Americans in the greater Washington DC region because of his "pro-choice" position. Indeed, many Filipinos in the US, like over 80 percent of us back home in the Philippines, are Roman Catholics. And while it is not surprising that many Filipino-Americans might have conservative views about women's right to choose, it is not altogether fair or accurate to depict all Filipino-Americans as rabidly anti-choice either. In a Los Angeles produced talk show on the Filipino Channel, for instance, Filipino-Americans are seen here engaged in a lively debate about abortion, where there were views expressed for and against defending women's right to decide. While the positions and arguments are familiar, the debate/talk show format is a bit different from what many of us are perhaps used to back home. In this show, the exchange gets heated but it's also quite restrained on both sides.

The problem is, however, when it comes to drawing the lines for and against women's right to decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term, the old battle-lines of "life/choice" are inadequate to get a conversation going about the concerns over the life and health of women who are presumably the common concern of both pro-choice and pro-life. While both sides stated their positions calmly, the debate on TFC may as well have been just another debate in the Philippines where both sides seemed to talk past each other without directly addressing the other's concern.

Our best advocates for reproductive health and women's rights can dish out all the statistics on maternal ill-health and mortality, family planning preferences and even the mechanism of action of contraceptives. These arguments continue to be relevant and advocates should in no way stop dishing them out. However, those on the other side who continue to harp on the life of the unborn (some of them even claiming the sperm has "life") are not easy to dismiss as unscientific because the stance they take or the argument they pose is obviously not just being made for the sake of science but sympathy.

One young woman even announced that if she ended up getting raped and pregnant because of it, she would, as a Catholic, accept it as God's will for her. This made a lot of people uncomfortable because ironically she was not really just talking about her own hypothetical right to decide but requiring other women to meet this standard she had set for herself.

Theirs is an appeal to morality that needs to be challenged and tackled head on. By harping on "life," and "fetal rights" the anti-choice makes it appear that the other side does not want babies to be born and that all women who have abortions take their decisions lightly. At one point in the TFC discussion, one woman on the side of choice actually spelled this out and I think made the most headway in the debate arguing in essence that "being for choice we do not mean we want each and every pregnant woman to have an abortion. It's about not interfering with women who have to make that decision."