First, is there an invasion of privacy if the state requires all prospective husbands and wives to disclose–prior to the marriage–if he/she is suffering from a sexually-transmissible disease? Second, is consent freely given when vital information has been withheld from the healthy spouse?
Invasion of privacy
The individual’s right to privacy is never absolute. It is always weighed against public interest. Although no one wants a situation where the state can arbitrarily curtail the right to privacy, the question remains: is HIV/AIDS not serious enough to warrant the protection of public interest? It should be remembered that the risk of infection is not limited to the healthy spouse alone. Their future children will be at risk too.
Consent, freely given
Consent presupposes that the person giving it has all the vital information that will make the consent a real one. How can a person give or withhold consent for something he is not aware of? Consent to contract marriage means consent to have sexual relations with the spouse. In other words, if a person knew that his/her future spouse had a sexually-transmissible disease, would he/she consent to the marriage at all?
It is especially significant that should the healthy spouse discover afterwards that his/her partner is suffering from a sexually-transmissible disease, he/she can claim fraud and have the marriage annulled.
I don’t get it. Why let the parties go through the rigmarole of marrying and later having it annulled when the facts could be established before the marriage is celebrated? Why does the law not give each of them the best opportunity to give not just any consent but an intelligent choice? Do I need to add that by doing so public interest is better protected as well?
I also need to ask this. Is there a centralized database with all the information on marriages annulled because one or both partners suffer from a sexually-transmissible disease? Shouldn’t there be one? Shouldn’t the information be made available to all civil registrars so that before issuing any marriage license, the applicants’ names can be checked against the database?
In a way, what the law lacks can be explained in terms of our culture. In Filipino culture, things like sexually-transmissible diseases, rape and incest are “private” things. They are skeletons in any family’s closet that most would prefer to remain buried long after they are all dead.
Well, one man’s shame may mean the death of another–an innocent one. And all because he was too ashamed to disclose that he had a sexually-transmissible disease.
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