A cancer taken for granted

Here's an assertion one is sure nobody dares contradicting: Like the prohibited drugs menace, overpopulation is a social cancer increasingly ailing the Filipino nation over the years.

Unlike the drugs menace, however, which the government is addressing, the population explosion has been taken for granted. Even Pres. Arroyo doesn't dare touch this issue with a ten-foot pole, ostensibly for fear of the Catholic Church.

It's a given that the Catholic Church bans any form of birth control, except the "rhythm method" that goes with the woman's monthly menstrual cycle. A noted Fil-Chinese taipan lamented that in Catholic countries worldwide, only in the Philippines where religion is so biased to the point of bigotry on family planning.

Get jolted by this demographic stat that the country's population growth rate at 2.3 percent or 1.7 million births per year, is inching up than down. The 1.7M annual growth rate means three babies are born every minute. Reckoned on 85 million to 86 million present population and, adding the yearly growth compounded annually, in ten years it grows to over 102 million.

And, with the unemployment rate pegged at 2.6 million or 7.4 percent of the total population as of October 2005, the National Statistics Office (NSO) finds that the unemployment rate is up by over 200 thousand per annum.

Given the political turmoil that bedevils the establishment, the more that this social cancer has been ignored, with nary any policy, or any modicum of official panacea.

There's no showing that the government has counter-measures to abate the blistering growth rate, or to lessen the rising unemployment rate. There's also no showing that the economy can meet the most basic demands of the 1.7 million per annum add-on. Moreover, the runaway birth rate is blamed for jam-packed schools.

Some Cebu businessmen inked a manifesto sometime ago supporting the government's "population management program", on prodding of the PopCom. But what specific program, or how to go about it, has not been spelled out, there being no mention of what or how overpopulation has to be rationalized.

Compared to the aggressive birth control program in the Marcos martial law years through the PopCom then, the present dispensation seems too timid, too obscure, too insouciant, and too equivocal in terms of a definite national policy road map on birth control, or its program specifics or details.

Why doesn't the state bite the bullet, if only to obviate more hungry mouths to feed, to clothe, to educate, and to nurse their health?

After all, which is more deleterious or morally evil: The prevention and/or intelligent choice of pregnancy before conception under the principle of responsible parenthood? Or, the uncontrolled pregnancy that results in abortions and/or in birth rates that are only just a notch or two lesser and less often than the litters of piglets and puppies?

Without meaning to be demeaning, one had repeatedly observed that among the "can't afford" to raise children, their lame excuse for their being prolific "multipliers" is "Pagbuot man gud na sa Ginoo". No wonder, with the present trend of uninhibited sex galore, over 400,000 abortions occur every year in our midst.

And procreating babies has become a leading "cottage industry" in the hovels and shacks of the prolific poor, resulting in 75 percent of Filipinos being that poor.