EDITORIAL – The population time bomb

If she’s surly, perhaps birth control pills are to blame. That was President Arroyo’s way of dismissing reports that she had used birth control pills. This detail about her younger years was brought up recently because the President has been reluctant to make an aggressive push for artificial contraception as part of her administration’s population program.

Yet the President, an economist, must surely know that rapid population growth is hobbling national development and economic recovery. The World Bank estimates that 40 percent of 80 million Filipinos are living on less than $1 a day. The situation isn’t going to improve when the number of people competing for limited resources keeps growing. While the nation continues to post modest economic growth, the rate is not enough for the fruits of progress to trickle down to the grassroots.

Ideally, population growth should translate into greater national productivity. But when development cannot keep up with population growth and people simply end up competing for finite resources, the population boom has to be tamed.

Ideally, too, couples should employ the natural method of birth control. Couples need accurate information on this method, however, along with self-control that many men are unwilling to exercise. In depressed communities where women who lack education often end up as victims of spousal abuse, a wife cannot set conditions for physical intimacy with her husband. For such women, the only way to avoid too many pregnancies is artificial contraception.

Yet successive administrations, scared of incurring the ire of the Catholic Church, have been timid in promoting family planning programs that include artificial contraception.

The Church is unlikely to change its stand on a matter of faith, but the go-vernment can change its tack in dealing with the population time bomb. Studies have shown that many Catholic Filipino women have been using the pill and other contraceptives. These are women who, like the President in her younger years, have the means to obtain artificial contraceptives. These are women who, like the President, are educated enough to recognize the need to space pregnancies and plan family size. These are women who are not forced to undergo abortions, unlike the hundreds of thousands of Filipinas each year who deal with unwanted pregnancies by resorting to that traumatic operation.

The President insists she is no longer running in 2004. Since she no longer has to worry about the clout of the Church, she is free to pursue a more aggressive family planning program. The least she can do is to make the choices available to her just as accessible to ordinary Filipinos.