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Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales, in a speech the
other day during the 40th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical
on the Regulation of Birth, exhorted married couples to refrain from
having sex if the woman is fertile.
Those who follow this
Church-sanctioned natural family planning method, he said, possess
“true values of life” and tend to be good citizens.
Also the other day, Church
leaders, including 12 bishops, held a prayer rally in Manila to
affirm their support for a Vatican decree against the use of
contraceptives and other artificial birth control methods.
A House bill seeking to give
couples the choice of family planning methods, including the use of
contraceptives, has provoked a controversy between pro-life
advocates led by the Catholic Church and those who stand for
artificial birth control measures to control population growth.
The Philippine Council of
Evangelical Churches, which had expressed concern over the
country’s “alarming growth of population,” has assailed the
Catholic Church’s stand.
“About 5,800 babies are born
daily . . . One does not have to be an economist to tally how much
more food, water, shelter, medicine and other resources will be
needed for their support,” said the group. It raised the concern
that at the present growth rate, “there will be 100 million
Filipinos by 2013.”
We are worried over a galloping
population growth because it leads to the problem of having many
more mouths to feed, as the evangelical group had feared. But it is
also true that every child that is born has as well a pair of hands
with the potential to create wealth. In that sense, a newborn child
is a potential asset rather than a liability.
It does not follow that couples
with five or more children are doomed to poverty or that a family
with one offspring is bound to prosper. It has been shown by actual
examples that many parents have been elevated to a life of comfort
through their children who have pulled themselves up by their own
bootstraps to become successful professionals and businessmen.
The theory that the growth of
population could at a certain point in time exhaust the supply of
goods for the people’s needs was espoused by Robert Malthus, a
British economist.
In his essay, the Principle of
Population, he warned that the humanity was doomed “if
unrestrained population growth continued.” This tendency,
according to him, will “depress living standards continuously to a bare
subsistence level.”
Malthus, who lived in the late
18th century, had no prescience about the emergence of
contraceptives and other modern methods on birth control. He had
assumed that when the population grew faster than the production of
resources, “the growth is checked by famine, disease and war.”
He was for a “moral restraint
to keep population within manageable levels.”
In 1980, the United Nations
estimated the world population at 4.4 billion. There were
demographic projections of a 6-billion world population in this
century at a modest growth rate. Large increases are expected in the
developing countries. By continent, Asia is predicted to have the
fastest growth.
Several countries, heeding the
Malthusian warning, have adopted artificial birth control methods to
keep a low population.
China, with about a billion
people, has adopted a program for one-child families. Japan
instituted its own family program, using contraception and abortion
to limit family size.
In the 70s, Singapore issued a
population policy, limiting couples to have not more than two
children. But in the next decade, threatened with the loss of its
national identity, it reversed the program.
Its government started to sponsor
so-called “love” sea voyages for marriageable men and women,
especially from the educated class, to encourage courtships between
the sexes that could lead to marriage.
Japan is also experiencing low
birthrates because of its population policy. Unless it reverses or
modifies it, there will come a time when it will have to relax its
immigration laws to draw in foreign workers to man its factories.
The Japanese social security system is going to bust with fewer and
fewer young workers entering the workforce to pay SSS contributions
that will fund the pensions of the retired workers.
Key to economic growth
Human resources, drawn from the
population, are one of the keys to economic growth. There is no
reason why we should worry about population increase. The
Philippines still has a vast area of undeveloped land capable of
holding 100 million people to help in the exploration and
development of its natural resources.
How to feed, clothe, house and
educate the country’s growing population is a matter for the
government to resolve with creativity and passion. It calls for good
family upbringing, national discipline and the willingness of our
people to contribute their talents and energy to achieve the
country’s social and economic goals.
There is no urgency at this time
to control population growth. If properly oriented toward nation
building, it is not a hindrance to progress.
agr0324@yahoo.com
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