LuisTeodoro.com

The Catholic Church is of course correct. Population control is not the solution to poverty.

The solution is elsewhere: in the reform and even dismantling of the unjust economic and social structures of society, which in many cases cannot be achieved without the transfer of political power from one class to another—or at least the thorough, noncosmetic, authentic democratization of power.

Who makes the policies and implements them, and for whom, is the first critical question that addressing poverty and development must answer. Governments are not neutral entities informed solely by visions of bettering the lives of the people they govern. They are run by people with interests to protect and/or advance, as has been amply demonstrated in this country since 1946, when Philippine independence was restored.

The Philippines has had a succession of supposedly autonomous governments since then, each one run by people with different names, but from the same class and even the same families. That this country has not moved forward and has even slid further down the slopes of poverty, mass misery and social instability suggests, at the very least, that the political and economic elite that has had a virtual monopoly of political power in this country since before independence is not particularly adept, imaginative, or even interested in solving its problems.

Many Filipinos, especially those from the middle classes, sense rather than know this. It is the sense that the governments they have had are sorely wanting in some quality they cannot define which drove them twice to EDSA: the first time to remove a dictator, the second a President derided for his alleged corruption and other vices as well as his obvious intellectual shortcomings.

Both presidents, however, had been elected because of these very Filipinos’ hope that they could make things better. Marcos won handily over his rival in 1965, and again in 1969, as did Estrada in 1998. In both instances, academics, media people and other elements of the middle class were at least partly responsible.

In 1986 and 2001, People Power tried to correct their and the electorate’s mistake. In both instances, however, an election could have done the same thing—except that there were no prospects for credible elections during the Marcos dictatorship, as indeed was demonstrated in February 1986, when even Marcos’ American friends had to concede that he “stole the elections.” On the other hand, Estrada was only in his third year of a six-year term, and in any case, could have handily won an election if one were held in 2001.

Now feared and derided as a mockery of the democratic process, People Power is driven by precisely the growing sense that who’s in office is critical not only to how the country is being run, but also to its future. Unfortunately, that sense has so far not yet grown into the awareness that it’s not just those in power who have to be changed, but what they represent.

The solution to poverty can in short be implemented, at least in this country, only when the political question is settled—when real reform in the political sphere leads to the election of a worker or farmer, or at least those who authentically represent these basic classes. After that will come the hard part of implementing the tough policies that will reform the economic and social structures that have made the poverty of the vast majority inevitable.

In such an effort, family planning will have a role, but it shall not have been the leading one. High population growth rates seem, in the first place, to be only a part of the poverty syndrome. Every poor country has been besieged by such growth, while those that may be considered prosperous uniformly have low birth rates.

This is not an argument against population control via family planning. Keeping population growth rates down may not solve poverty. But it will certainly mean sharing scarce resources among fewer claimants, which in turn can make the lives of the poor a little more bearable.

At the very least it helps in the short term. Assuming the existence of a government which has adopted policies to decisively address the basic causes of poverty, keeping population growth rates low buys time before the effects of the reforms kick in. Even those governments to whom structural reforms are the last (or even nonexistent) priority have in fact had to fashion some kind of population control policy based on family planning, the link between quality of life and high population growth rates being far too evident to ignore.

As President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo pointed out in her address (read for her by Executive Secretary Alberto Romulo) during the opening ceremonies of the Fourth World Meeting of Families on January 22, the government has to address the country’s high birthrate (2.36 percent annually—one of the highest in the world) through a population control program based on family planning.

In what was clearly a departure from her previous policy of toeing the Catholic Church line that encourages only “natural” methods of birth control, Mrs. Arroyo used the word choice for the first time.

Mrs. Arroyo said she had instructed the health department to conduct a “fertility awareness education campaign” to “enable Filipino families to make informed choices.”

“Choice” of course includes not only the usual artificial means of birth control but abortion as well, which, however, might not have been Mrs. Arroyo’s meaning. However, “choice” is a concept at the heart of the debate between those who favor abortion as a means of preventing births, and those who oppose it.

That was enough to provoke Philippine Catholic Church leaders into demanding an explanation of what she meant—and for Mrs. Arroyo to respond by backpedaling from the obvious implications of her Romulo-read address by throwing together concepts that in other climes conflict with each other as the guiding principles of her population policy.

These principles, she said, are responsible parenthood, respect for life, birth spacing and informed choice. The first, however, is in this and other countries synonymous with the use of artificial methods of birth control. “Respect for life” is on the other hand regarded as the opposite of “choice,” as in pro-life vs. prochoice.

All of which added up to not really clarifying much—to which recourse she seems to have been forced, however, by the obvious contradiction between her previous preference for following Church policy and her January 22 statements, as well as by a desire not to antagonize the leaders of her own faith.

Mrs. Arroyo’s seeming attempt to placate the Church at first blush appeared to contradict her claimed focus on the making of a strong republic, which among others would craft policies and implement them without being pulled and pushed this way and that by certain interests including the Church.

She may not have wimped out, however. The advocates of family planning for the sake of women’s health and control over their own bodies and a necessary part of any sustained effort to improve the quality of life could take heart from Mrs. Arroyo and family’s absence from the January 26th closing ceremonies of the Fourth World Meeting of Families at the Luneta. She could be saying through her absence something she couldn’t say in words, only in deeds: that she meant every word of her January 22nd address.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, January 28, 2003)

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