The Irate Spectator

I miss my old High School Batchmates. Being immersed in this Hellhole of a college with its mountains of papers to submit and exams to study for (which is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing right now), makes me feel some nostalgia to the carefree days of High School when i could make the Honor's list without passing any projects and all the books we had to read could be retrieved out of my trusty backpack. Nowadays, miss a single paper and your grade plunges to the abyss and you have to spend half a school day wandering around hunting for reading materials you need to have a photocopy of for tomorrow's exam.

Speaking of wandering around, back in High School you had your own room where you could stay for the whole day with your own people to chill with, unlike in college where you spend a full one-fourth of the day just looking for a place to chill. And the people, college people are like boarders in a dormitory(which most of them are really). One minute there here, a second later their off to class or to a watering hole or a mall or God knows where. High School people, on the other hand, you're stuck with them so you might as well make the best of it and join them in their plot to sneak past the unsuspecting security guard to a wonderful place wher you can all play DOTA...

Yes, those were the days. Which is why I always look forward to reunions with my high school buddies although College cruelty truly knows no bounds and keeps me so busy that when a text message tells me to go to this place where my batchmates will be trooping together I can only sigh and grumble about having to finish my case digests so I can't come. Fortunately, I run into them from time to time, while wating for the ferry, at the V-hire terminal, even in school, some of my batchmates go to the same university as me after all. I welcome these chance encounters very much although lately I find these quite unsettling, honestly.

When we get together, conversation inevitably wanders to our other batchmates. Earlier I would hear things like, "Did you hear? So-and-so is a Dean's Lister!" or "Well, So-and-so and his girl are still together." Pretty usual stuff punctuated now and then by a few more out of the blue remarks like "So-and-so and Blah-blah-blah broke up!" and "So-and-so stopped schooling this semester." But the unsettling part is the shocking "SO-AND-SO GOT PREGNANT!!". And its getting more and more frequent.

But of course, by saying I'm not making any judgements in any way. PMS happens with people my age and I'm perfectly aware of that. A lot of mornings, usually the one after Valentine's, I wake up and wonder how many people I know got laid last night for some reason. I can be quite loony sometimes. Anyway, this isn't just speculation i have the statistics to prove that more young people are having sex and people who have sex are getting younger. For Example, the 2002 State of the Philippine Population Report said 16% of young people had sexual encounters before age 15, and that was like six years ago. Plus, the Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study concluded that the mean age of sexual encounters were 17 for males and 18 for females (as a side note it also said pornographic acculturation occurs at a mean age of 15 quite high by my estimates.. ;D).

But I'm boring you with numbers, suffice it to say more young people are having sex and as a consequence, more young people are getting pregnant and I can attest to that personally. This is why we need to do something about this problem and don't talk to me about moral renewal or something. That's the Church's job and frankly, if it did its job there wouldn't have been a problem. We don't need some Manichaean moralizing on the evils of the flesh. What we need is a concrete government policy to address this problem of teenage pregnancy and that's why i have always suported the really controversial, but gradually being forgotten, House Bill 5043 or the (in)famous Reporductive Health Bill. I won't go into the details of this piece of legislation, having done so lots of times before somewhere else, but I will say that it isn't like the old Population Control Bills that preceded it. It focuses, as the title suggests, on Reproductive Health and any population result there would just be a positive externality. One of its provisions also mandate reproductive health and sexuality education for students beginning the Fifth Grade, which is actually already available in some schools - I had reproductive and sexuality topics integrated in some of my subjects way back Grade 4. This is especially aimed at young people who honestly don't know what they're getting into when they "get into it".

That's why let's all urge for the passage of HB 5043. I did my part. The USC-SSC passed a resolution expressing support for the Bill authored by myself and co-sponsored by my colleagues Hon. Rojas and Hon. Kho. I also sent a copy to the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network (RHAN) to show our solidarity with other sectors in pushsing for the passage of the RH Bill. Until then, I'm hoping that the next time I cross paths with a High School friend, we can talk about a batchmate who won a beauty pageant or something.