Unmet need for family planning?

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
July 16, 2012

This is another expression coined by population controllers busy working in influential institutions like the UN. They define it as “percentage of currently married women aged 15-49 who want to stop having children or postpone the next pregnancy for at least two years, but who are not using contraception.”

Yes, it is just as cold as that. No further distinction is made, much less, any mention of moral, ethical or cultural considerations. It makes the illegal and automatic equation that women who don’t want to get pregnant are the same women who want or should want to have contraception. That’s foul!

In short, it is all about unmet need for contraception, whether wanted or not. Thus, this concept of unmet need is a license for population controllers to indiscriminately spread the virus of the contraceptive mentality all over the world.

While many countries are suffering from all sorts of economic problems and many other more basic needs, population controllers just focus on making contraception available or actively pushing it, branding it as the panacea for poverty and other women-related problems.

And it is the so-called rich countries (we have to qualify it that way, since many of them are actually now having tremendous economic problems) that want to control the population of poor but bustling countries, that are financing for this unmet need. These rich countries seem threatened by the poor countries.

They say that “contraceptives are one of the best investments a country can make in its future.” They still talk about the so-called “demographic dividend” that illegitimately equates fewer people with higher development. Everyone knows that this is not necessarily so and that, in fact, the reverse can be true.

Some reports claim that the rich and famous of the world have donated $2.6 billion recently in a summit in London to meet the “unmet need” of 120 million women in the developing world for family planning.

This looks to me like a lot of moolah just going down the sinkhole, a pure waste of precious resources, when there are many other more important needs that require both immediate help and sustained support.

For example, Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), a non-profit institute that closely follows the United Nations and other organizations on family and population issues, claims that the real needs of women in many places are still unmet: basic medical care, skilled birth attendants, education, clean water, and nutrition.”

He also claims that many countries are now facing a demographic winter where there is already a notable population decline, where older people are outnumbering the younger population, where deaths are getting higher than births.

He noted that even in Muslim countries that are long known to have big population, a significant fertility decline is already taking place. It seems they also are succumbing to the contraceptive mentality.

Here in our country a CNN report recently observed that while many other Asian countries are experiencing some economic slowdown, we are having an economic surge instead.

Economists attribute it to many factors, like a recovery of electronics exports after a decline in demand last year, a strong domestic consumption due to the money sent home to the Philippines by its overseas workers, and the rise of outsourced call centers that serve as the long-term stabilizers relatively unhindered by a sagging global economy.

According to Haz Narvaez, Manila-based head of research for the Philippines at the Credit-Suisse, it is estimated that 11% of the 92 million Filipinos work overseas, and their remittances account for about 10% of the country’s GDP, totaling $225 billion in 1991.

Since these Filipino overseas work often as domestic workers, nurses or skilled technicians or in jobs that are less vulnerable during global economic slumps, they can continue working and sending money to our country.

Narvaez said, “You have an aging population in the West, and you have a young population here in the Philippines waiting to do jobs that some people in the West are not willing to do.” This must explain why our overseas workers continue to find jobs abroad and support our country significantly and rather stably.

We should be wary when we hear some political leaders talk about the RH Bill because this is pure baloney. The RH Bill has no other purpose than to integrate the contraceptive mentality and the population control program into our country.