"Our leaders should defy the purists in our numerous Church who insist on the narrow-minded interpretation of the Almighty’s admonition to go forth and multiply."
"Our leaders should defy the purists in our numerous Church who insist on the narrow-minded interpretation of the Almighty’s admonition to go forth and multiply."
It is quite dismaying to learn that Congress has cut the population management program’s budget by scrapping the budget for contraceptive implants. The amount may be small (P225 million) compared to the totality of the yet pork-laden P4.1-trillion budget, but it would be a regressive move, especially in the light of findings that the country has an alarming teenage pregnancy problem.
National Economic and Development Authority Secretary Ernesto Pernia has described our high rate of teenage pregnancies as a “national social emergency.” And it is.
A National Health Demographic Survey done in 2017 showed that 9 percent of Filipino women between 15 and 19 years of age have begun childbearing, or a rate of 24 children born to teenage mothers every hour!
Still, the Senate and the bicameral conference committee gave way to Senate President Tito Sotto’s perpetual advocacy of supporting the archaic policy of the Roman Catholic Church, even to the extent of labelling contraceptive implants as “abortifacient.” Which it is not.
Both the World Health Organization and the Food and Drug Administration have scientifically ruled that contraceptive implants do not induce abortion. These are scientists speaking. The Senate President is simply against population control, standing by the fallacious arguments of the numerous church in the Philippines, even if in Italy, or Spain, or Ireland which consider themselves very Catholic, allow birth control measures as a matter of sound social and economic management.
The implant allows women to space their ability to get pregnant to three years, by inserting a single, matchstick-sized rod containing the hormone progestin into the left arm of right-handed women and vice-versa. The injectable prevents the meeting of the egg and the sperm by preventing the release of a mature egg from the ovary. It also thickens the cervical mucus in the neck of the uterus, making it difficult for the sperm to pass through.
It thus prevents contraception; it does not abort babies.
Which now brings me to the central question: Why do we not practice sensible population management in this country?
Why can we not accept that women should space their pregnancies, not only for their health and happiness, but also because having so many children in a family defies parents’ ability to raise these children in a healthy, well-nourished and properly provided manner? Stunting, undernourished minds and bodies, inability to cope up with basic needs early in life inevitably doom the lives of our future generation.
Truth is, most of the problems of this benighted land can be traced to its huge population.
Hugeness is to be compared to land area and resource endowments. We have a population of 110 million. But our land area is no more than 30 million hectares of land, scattered among more than seven thousand islands, some of which are nothing else but limestone formations incapable of growing anything but scrub.
By contrast, California, the most populous state of the United States, has 40 million hectares with a population of 40 million. The entire US of A has a population of 320 million, three times more than the Philippines, but then, its land area is all of 915 million hectares, thirty times bigger than ours in an almost contiguous land mass.
When I was in charge of ensuring that the country would have enough rice to feed our people each year, I always get asked by those who pine for the Marcos years when for a brief shining period we produced enough of the staple grain to feed the population—why it is that we have to import rice when Thailand used to send students to learn agriculture at UP Los Baños?
When Marcos achieved that feat in 1978, we were all of 44-million mouths to feed. Thailand had 43 million then. But now, we are all of 110 million existing in an area which totals 30 million hectares. Thailand has managed to keep its population up to 70 million only, and it has a land area of 51 million hectares.
See the math?
So little land, so many people.
Sure, our birth rate has been declining a bit in recent years. That’s not because of active government-sponsored population management programs, as they do in other countries. That’s because almost a tenth of our population are slaving abroad, separated from their husbands or wives.
And perhaps more sensible couples who refuse to listen to the admonition of their pulpit priests and realize that responsible parenthood means giving birth according to one’s ability to feed, clothe and educate their progeny in healthy manner.
To his credit, Ferdinand Marcos saw that this was unsustainable, and so created the Population Commission to actively promote population management. But his successor Cory Aquino, listening to the un-lamented Cardinal Sin and his acolytes, reversed the momentum.
Name a major problem of the benighted land, from having to import food whether rice or galunggong; or an educational system strained to the hilt, unable to put enough classrooms throughout the country; a health system with not enough hospitals where the sick just lie there and die there; even traffic in its major cities. The obvious reason, aside from government inefficiency and corruption, is numbers.
There are simply far too many numbers in the divisor of resources and capabilities.
We, both Filipino families and the government, need to work double-time, triple-time just to provide the barest of needs for our ever-increasing population.
Thus we have the OFW phenomenon, which some idiots in priestly habits claim as one of the advantages (blessings from heaven they say) of not controlling our population growth.
One of the major pillars of our economy rests on this phenomenon of overseas migration in search of family survival, can you beat that?
The leader after President Duterte, and he himself in the remaining two years and a half of his term, should actively pursue population management, defying the purists in our numerous Church who insist on the narrow-minded interpretation of the Almighty’s admonition to go forth and multiply.