Poverty and the RH bill

Reflecting on the brouhaha in the national debate on the Reproductive Health bill, Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, in his article entitled “The Philippines Under Fire” wrote: On the one side are the Planned Parenthood types, backed by well-funded international organizations, who are attempting to ram through legislation that would cripple the Filipino birth rate. On the other side stand those who believe that the most precious resource of the Philippines is its people, and who object to the use of what some call “human pesticides” to control the Filipino population . . . The legislation in question is called “The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health And Population And Development Act Of 2011”—a title that manages the remarkable feat of encapsulating three lies of the abortion/population control movement in the short span of a dozen words.

What are these three lies?

The first according to Mosher is about “Responsible Parenthood.” To him this is “shorthand for the wrongheaded notion that couples are somehow doing the world a favor by having few or no children.” Mosher says the opposite is true because children are the only future a nation has. “Those who are willing to provide for the future in the most fundamental way—by providing the future generation—are a national treasure. They should be praised and encouraged, not condemned and sterilized,” he added.

The second lie is about “Reproductive Health.” Mosher says that this is another favorite of the anti-life movement, which is equally misleading because such programs are not intended to produce health at all, but sterility. Defining the “reproductive health” of a population as the percentage of women of childbearing age who have been sterilized or who are using so-called “modern methods of contraception,” he went on to conclude that a population enjoying perfect “reproductive health” would not be able to reproduce at all!

The third lie finally, according to Mosher, is the implication of “Population and Development.” Under the RH bill, according to Mosher, population growth constitutes an intolerable burden on the economy. He admits that growing populations do produce temporary scarcities of goods and services but Mosher argues that in a free market, entrepreneurs respond by innovating—they devise more efficient means of production or find substitutes for scarce materials. To Mosher, at the end of the day, a larger population not only produces more goods and services, they do so at a lower price through economies of scale.
Mosher’s article was circulated by e-mail to some members of the Cebu business community. In the rest of the article, Mosher expounds more on his objections to the RH bill. I don’t have the space to put them here. Let me just share ,what I wrote as my response:

Actually, my concern is in seeing so many young kids born of parents who are poor and ignorant. Rich families produce fewer children. Consequently, this means that the Philippines as a nation will be composed of many poor people. What are the chances of the poor getting rich? Some will get rich by luck, hard work or whatever but most will remain poor and live in misery until they die. Manny Pacquiao was born poor and he is now a billionaire. How many Mannys do we have?

Good national economic policy might help the poor, especially if it’s inclusive in design, but that is only one side of the equation. The other side—population should also be considered.

“During the industrial revolution in England and the rest of Western Europe, many people got rich but many more also remained poor (just read Charles Dickens). They also had population pressure because while higher income and better health reduced their mortality rate, it also meant faster growth in population at a rate never seen in all the years before the industrial revolution.

However, the Europeans were lucky because about the time the industrial revolution started, new continents were also discovered which served as an exit valve of Europe’s growing population pressure.

Then they learned contraception and family planning. These helped to bring down their birth rate, thus reducing overall Europe population’s growth rate eventually. (A friend commented that a change in lifestyles that came with high income due to the industrial revolution also contributed to the reduction in the birth rate. This I accept.)

Here (in the Philippines), where do we send our booming number of people? From the poor countryside we send them to our cities only to create new communities of urban poor. We send some of them abroad but at what cost socially? Moreover, who can actually go abroad? Mostly, they are better trained and educated and those with the means to pay for the cost of living. How many of our poor people can meet these requirements?

Nine ladies of Cebu were recognized for their works of charity for the Catholic Church, and conferred a papal award as Dames of St. Sylvestre. Congratulations to Conchita Gastador-Go, Lourdes de Dios-Jereza, Alita Mendoza-Solon, Mariquita Salimbangon-Yeung, Anita Yu-Sanchez, Julia Ramon Gandiongco, Anita Esmeralda Cabinian, Rosa Maria Espina-Garcia, and Lourdes Vilma Cornejo-Lee.