Overpopulation: a 20th-century myth
|
|
If the majority buys the radical birth control initiative, does that make it right?
|
The initiative called for by population control agencies like the Philippine Legislators Committee on Population and Development(PLCPD), based on the Pulse Asia survey on family planning**, is argumentum ad populorum- a bandwagon argument.
The survey results should be expected, after all, loaded terms like “family planning” and “modern family planning” were associated with artificial contraceptives like condoms, IUDs, and sterilization. Could Pulse Asia’s team of analysts, “authorities” on population control like Mercedes Abad, Arsenio Balicasan, and Zelda Zablan, have in any way influenced the gathering of data to their interpretation?
The survey respondents were not asked whether they were aware of modern natural birth control based on fertility awareness like the Billings, Standard Days, Breast-feeding, and Basal Body methods, and whether the government educated them about these other methods they already knew. The respondents were not asked whether they were aware of the side effects of the contraceptives they were using, an issue which is central to a real debate on reproductive health.
The problem is that the so-called pro-choice groups like PLCPD, funded by contraceptive grants, curtail the advance of natural family planning, the knowledge of and access to which are supposed to make judgments informed and “fair.”
What was news were not really the survey results, but that the church is supposedly against birth control itself, whereas Catholic teachings on sex (and also Stoic and Hindu) follows a procreative economics: no sex outside marriage, no divorce and remarriage, and responsible parenthood eliminates many undesirable births.
But, of course, what population controllers like PLCPD want is birth control by all means, including the use of abortifacient hormonal contraceptives and IUDs, based on the belief that there is overpopulation—again a flawed argument.
The New York Times’ millennial edition declared overpopulation “one of the myths of the 20th century.” The world’s leading economists – including Nobel laureates in Economics like Simon Kuznets(1971), Gary Becker (1992), Amartya Sen (1998) and George Akerlof (2001) – say that a large population, if educated, employed and made productive, is a self-sustaining human capital. Singapore and many other Western countries used to draconian population control programs are now paying couples to have children. Is PLCPD promising any better?
Instead, we should oust PLCPD, a private entity pretending to be a government organization, from the House of Representatives, where it is lodging without legal authorization from Congress. This NGO, which lives on questionable polls and population myths, has no mandate to use public property.
NICOLO E. BERNARDO
Editor -in-chief
The Varsitarian
University of Sto. Tomas,Manila
* from “Letters to the Editor,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 5/26/07
** The Philippine Daily Inquirer issue of 4/14/07 reported that a Pulse Asia Survey of 1,800 adults found 89% wanted government to pay for family planning measures including medication, intra-uterine devices, condoms, ligation, and vasectomies.
|
|
