BY CITING the study of a population-control organization, purportedly showing the Philippines lagging behind Thailand and blaming the former’s non-adoption of population control, Manuel F. Almario (“Study reveals why RP lags behind neighbors,” Inquirer, 11/10/09) is merely like the junketing birth-control advocates who parrot what they have been fed in the West, which financed their junketing. Almario fails to apply a critical historical lens to the study; he even forgets the Philippines’ own history.
The study reportedly said that because the Philippines did not adopt population control, “by 1975, even their incomes (Thailand’s and RP’s), were about even, despite the fact that a quarter of a century before that, the Philippines’ per capita income was just slightly lower than Japan’s.”
The study does not mention—and Almario seems to forget—that in 1975, the Philippines already had the 1973 Marcos Constitution that enshrined family planning, probably the only charter in the world that had made fertility control a state policy. From martial law up to the end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, the Philippines was implementing a draconian population control law that freely distributed condoms and abortifacients, ligated women and vasectomized men, most of them poor.
What happened? Did the Philippine economy improve? No. The Philippines slumped to what the study calls “sick man in the region.” What caused the collapse and the spiral of poverty? Not “overpopulation” because it had supposedly been checked by birth control, but by wrong policy planning, gross mismanagement and widespread corruption. Family planning itself was an instance of all three.
It is ironic that the Philippine Congress now wants to pass the so-called Reproductive Health bill, which is nothing but a resurrection of the “Marcosian” birth-control policy.
What the study and Almario overlook is the dark side of Thailand’s safe-sex program. Boasting 100-percent condom use by its citizens, Thailand has become a major HIV-AIDS sufferer in the region: nearly half a million Thais or more than one-in-100 adults in that country of 65 million people are infected with HIV-AIDS. (The statistic does not include the more than half a million who have died.)
But still the population-control and safe-sex establishment calls it a model of AIDS prevention! In the Philippines meanwhile, with various statistics putting condom use at very low rates (from 10 percent to 37 percent), the HIV population is at 3,400 out of what population-control extremists call as an “overpopulation” of 89 million!
Now why again should Thailand be foisted as a model on the Philippines?
Now why again should Thailand be foisted as a model on the Philippines?
