The Pharmacy(tm)

Great feedback sent today by blog reader:

I want to share with you an article I came across recently which I think could explain why things are what they are. The article talked about abortion and it posits that any woman regardless of her moral or religious persuations will say that abortion is bad per se. Of course there are those currently debating the issue of whether abortion should be legalized as advocated by “pro-choice” women against the “pro-life” sector. But despite abortion being now illegal, in fact it is punishable as a crime, and despite condemnation by the church and pro-life advocates we all know that abortions continue unabated. Why does this happen when women in general consider abortion as bad per se. The writer points at the prevailing culture of liberality in sex as the culprit. When having sex has become just part of dating and done without any relation to marriage and procreation there will always be situations where a woman finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy where the casual recourse is to have an abortion and things are back to normal. This does not justify abortion it merely explains it the writer says. So until this culture is changed abortion will continue to happen. This brought to my mind some of the conditions we now have in our country like why is there no end to the Mindanao conflict despite all the efforts at peace making by the government. Perhaps, I thought, the government may not have really identified the culprit here. There must be a deeper fundamental reason to it than some moros just wanting to have their own nation. What if there is general prosperity among the people in Mindanao don’t we think the people themselves will rise against any faction, like the MILF, who will by their intransigence threaten to disrupt their prosperity. Just pondering.

My sense of the issue is that nearly everything we see prevalent in society have an economic underpinning, perhaps exceeding the cultural contribution to the phenomenon.

On abortion:

While it is true that sex, more specifically casual sex is getting more and more part of socially accepted behaviour (religious taboo notwithstanding), we should also not forget the discount that sex is also an economic behaviour. Although we do not have legalized prostitution, the fact of the matter is that paid sex is pretty much present (albeit underground) in our society ever since the Spanish era. If the writer you mention might care to dig into the statistics, he will find that sex workers account for a good chunk (maybe even the majority) of the abortions conducted.

That abortions persist is a direct result of the prevalence of paid sex–which is an economic phenomenon as much as it is cultural.

Mindanao is another example:

We often look at ideological and political, even religious reasons for why Moros want to secede and why the war continues, but we fail to examine enough the economic angles of it–and this is not merely the poverty of some areas in Mindanao. More of: Mindanao as a whole is resource rich area and practically untapped by capitalism. The energy, mining, and infrastructure interests alone are more than enough to fill the pockets of businessmen for decades–and the Moros know this as much as the establishment.

However, the war raging in that area has gone on forever due also to war profiteers who supply both sides with arms and supplies. It has been the subject of many reports that the arms the MILF use are from the AFP arsenal. When the talk “peace process” and “federalism” started gaining ground recently, I began to think that the war mongering was giving way to more serious money-making.