'The Birth Control Solution'

Thank you! Mr. Kristof is my favorite reporter!

(It's not by chance that Desmond Tutu called him an "honorary African")

Allow me to share with you a text by a very good sociologist, who writes from the Philippines, a Catholic country where the most part of the children end in the streets or in crowded prisons, and are easy preys to pimps and "sex tourists":

Sinking deeper in poverty

By: Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Almost exactly a year ago today (Nov. 3, 2011), I wrote about a young couple who had requested to live and do subsistence farming in a 1.5-hectare plot of marginal land on the slopes of Mt. Malasimbo in Bataan that I had planted to mangoes and coconuts (“Mired in poverty,” Inquirer, 11/11/10). Both in their mid-30s, Rosalie and Dodoy had four children. Their eldest, a boy, was 14 and in third year high school, and the youngest, another boy, was about two years old. In between were two girls who were in grade school. At the time I wrote about them, Dodoy had not been sending money from Manila, where he moved and worked irregularly as an extra tricycle driver.

Rosalie heard that, in fact, Dodoy had taken up with another woman. After confirming this, she went to the local barangay to complain. She came to me later to ask if she and her children could continue to live in my farm—a request that I found strange because I thought she was not the kind of woman who would draw her status as a person from her husband’s authority. Without hesitation, I said yes, assuring her also that I would continue to give the one-thousand-peso monthly allowance I had pledged for their children’s school needs. I, however, inquired how she planned to support her young family by herself. She said she would manage by selling vegetables in the town market. I was skeptical about this brave woman’s resolve, but I wished her all the luck in the world and told her not to hesitate to ask for help.

Knowing how much she cared about her children’s education, I remember advising her to enlist in the government’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program, for which she and her children were clearly qualified. She said she had inquired about it and had been told to wait for the new enlistment that was to take place in December last year. I never found out if she actually got on the expanded CCTP list of the Aquino administration.

Early this year, Rosalie told me she had decided to leave the small hut atop the hill that had been their home for more than five years. She said that without a husband she didn’t feel safe living there with her young children. She informed me that, in the presence of the barangay captain, she and Dodoy had agreed to officially part ways. After sending the two older children to her estranged husband’s family, she moved to another barrio with her two younger kids.

The eldest son, now 15, who had given her the strongest hope for a better life, eventually dropped out of school after failing to take the final exams for the third year high school. Today he works off and on as a day laborer in a poultry farm, with neither functional skills nor ambition to see him through his mature years. Rosalie herself has found another man in the barrio in which she sought shelter and is now pregnant with his child. Dodoy, who has come back from his fruitless search for work in Manila, still does odd jobs at construction sites. He also has another child by his new partner.

If this were only the story of one family that, because of the personal inadequacies of the parents, has found itself mired in poverty, there is little reason to take up its problems at the level of public discourse. My hunch, however, is that its circumstances are typical and familiar to many. A whole generation of Filipinos, equipped with little education and no usable skills other than the most basic, have entered parenthood. Uprooted from their elders’ farming communities, they live marginal lives as migrants in towns and cities whose opportunity structure offers them no place. As expected, they don’t earn enough to keep body and soul together.

Because of constant money problems, relations between spouses are strained beyond what is bearable. But it is their young offspring who absorb the greatest costs of material deprivation. The children don’t get enough nourishment for their young bodies. Domestic conflict and abuse take their toll on their emotional development. In their despair, they lose their taste for school, and dream of ways to get out of parental control as soon as they can. Before long, they drop out of school to find work or, worse, to set up their own families even before they can provide for their own personal needs.

In her heart of hearts, Rosalie knew that only the education of her children could help them break out of this inter-generational cycle of poverty in which they were trapped. She held out the highest hope that if her eldest son could finish high school and move on to complete a vocational course, the rest of her children would have someone to support them, and, as importantly, to emulate. Unfortunately, her resoluteness caved in when her husband went astray. Dodoy was aware of his wife’s aspiration for the children, but he felt powerless to do anything to make it a reality. He went to Manila, I suspect, not just to find a job, but to escape from the painful reality of seeing his kids slowly starve.

Ultimately, it is the breakup of the family—due usually to paternal abandonment—that seals the fate of the children. That need not be the case. In mature societies, the state does everything to neutralize the effects of a family’s poverty or, indeed, of the parents’ marital break on the development of a child. The child’s interests are considered paramount, and the state does not hesitate to intervene at any level to ensure they are protected and served.

We have a long way to go before we can become such a society. The inequalities in our midst are just too stark and unchanging, and the nation’s leaders are just too preoccupied with serving the interests of the rich to bother with the fate of young people who mostly come from the poor.

Nothing new here at all.

Education in birth control (and availability of the means to practice it) reduces some of the strains on food sources and other means of living, and reduces the numbers of abortions. Nothing new here.

Cutting back funding for national and international agencies that, among other things, provide birth control information and the means to practice it, will result in -- among other things -- increased numbers of abortions. Nothing new here.

I don't want to seem glib or smug, but I don't get whatever is intended in this NYT peice to advance my knowledge. Perhaps the author's skipping over the fact that some Christians (strict Catholics, esp.) are against artificial birth control. Perhaps, that is, some subliminal message is being conveyed about how the problem looks without mentioning the religious differences.

I believe that artificial birth control is a real choice, and not a sin. Some other practicing Catholics strongly believe otherwise. Many more Catholics and many non-Catholics (Christians and non-Christians) are very opposed to abortion. The opposition to abortion is increasing in our country as we come to better understand the damage it does to the women who undergo it, and, of course, what the procedure itself entails. And we now better understand the importance of providing alternatives for the child: adoption, and too many other options for me to mention. But the NYT writer doesn't mention this, so I don't have to say "nothing new here."

By process of elimination, the NYT writer must be trying to encourage continued financial support for global (third world) birth control efforts. As I say, nothing new here. The fact that Republicans are leading the effort to cut back funding of national and international efforts to support birth control (and hence, these are Republican efforts that will increase abortions everywhere) should be no surprise if you already realise that the Republican Party's affiliation with the anti-abortion bag of the Tea Party is superficial. So, nothing new here.

Those who are followers of Thomas Malthus must periodically go to their keyboards and type out seemingly fresh re-hash. The recent 7 billion population number news has brought out the old theories.

Vincent J. Walsh, Jr., Ph.D.

"...and have it more abundantly" ---- that means having a better life, not more life. Since nearly 100% of Western Civilization Catholics reject the silly and destructive policy of the Church on artificial birth control, maybe the Boys in Red ought to take another look at the issue just to give themselves some relevance.