Chinese Style Population Control in the Catholic Philippines?

The Philippines is currently considering a population control law that would give incentives to families that limit the number of children to two.

The House of Representatives has agreed to hold a plenary debate, starting around mid-January, on the "Responsible Parenthood and Population Management Act," known locally as House Bill (HB) 3773.

Proponents say the bill is urgently needed to curb population growth and fight poverty in the Southeast Asian nation -- a country of 84 million people, an estimated 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

That would be unexciting news in place like China or the Soviet Union, but the Philippines is a predominantly Catholic country. As should be expected, the Catholic Church is none too happy with the proposed law. Catholic teaching flatly prohibits the use of contraceptives and abortion as birth control methods.

Having been to the Philippines and seen the conditions there first hand, I can tell you they are truly heartbreaking. In Manila, once one of the most modern cities in Asia, the streets are filled with beggars, the homeless, and thousands upon thousands of roaming children. Some packs of kids I observed walking along main thoroughfares unattended were ages 5 and younger. At night, it seems like half the city lives on the streets. The rest seem to live in hovels along the train tracks or in ramshackle ghettos lined with trash and patrolled by scores of ownerless mangy dogs. It both sickening and gutwrenching to see people living that way. I didn't snap one photo in Manila I was so horrified by what I saw.

Being a Catholic country with such conditions, naturally critics' first target is the Church. If it wasn't so adamantly opposed to birth control, the tired argument goes, then the Philippines would have to be a better place to live! "Too many people = poverty" seems to be the argument.

Wrong.

The most truthful statement in the article linked to above is this short, but accurate one:

"Too many people don't cause poverty," said one opposing lawmaker, Rene Velarde. "Bad governance and policies do."

As a lifelong news junkie and political science/history buff, I couldn't help but take my own unscientific sampling of the population regarding their views on what's wrong with the Philippines. Nobody cited population. Nobody cited religion. Everyone, without exception, pointed directly at the government. Particularly, they felt that Ferdinand Marcos's tenure as president/dictator bankrupted the country. (Everyone remembers his wife's 20,000 pairs of shoes.) As one man pointed out, when an individual raids the treasury over the course of 30 years at the expense of the people, it is difficult to recover. It is even more difficult to recover when subsequent regimes also exhibited a propensity for corruption rather than reform.

The Filipinos are some of the best people you'll ever meet. Personally, I'd prefer that there were more of them, rather than a government sponsored fewer. If there was any country where the government should have less influence over the lives of its people as opposed to more, it's the hapless Philippines.