Out of options

Cong. Edcel Lagman raised a storm when he proposed that the State adopt a 2-child policy in order to curb population growth.

It remains a nebulous proposal, however.

Lagman says that the "policy" will not mean that the State will make the limit of two children per couple compulsory. It is, at any rate, difficult to imagine how a compulsory limit could even be enforceable.

We cannot send excess infants to a gas chamber. I don’t think we can forcibly perform vasectomy on men who have become fathers twice over. We cannot order maternity hospitals to routinely sterilize mothers after their second birth.

We will need a truly barbaric regime to enforce a limit on family size.

Besides, enforced limits on family size will cause distortions in our demographics. China, in its moment of desperation, decreed a limit of one child per couple. That measure invited a wave of abortions and murders of female infants, since male offspring were preferred in this culture.

A generation from now, China will deal with extremely complicated social consequences arising out of a serious demographic imbalance between males and females in her population.

China is even now coping with a serious social disorder – a phenomenon called "Little Emperors" – where sole offspring are spoiled by a set of parents and two sets of grandparents. With the overdose of attention, solo children have become little tyrants.

In India, during the time of Rajiv Gandhi, a program of forced vasectomy was undertaken. That raised howls about the wanton and widespread violation of human rights.

Lagman is actually proposing a "comprehensive" package of incentives and disincentives to encourage young couples to limit family size to two children. What these are we do not know yet. But we hope it does not include penalizing third and fourth children.

But if this "comprehensive" package does not include penalties, how will it ever become enforceable?

I trust Lagman has a richer imagination than I have. For days now, I have been trying to imagine, with little success, what such a "comprehensive" package could possibly contain.

And while we all try to imagine a "comprehensive" package that would dramatically bring down our population growth, the situation is fast becoming really desperate.

Four Filipinos are borne every minute. In many communities, children spill all over the streets. Our school system could not cope with the constantly rising demand for more classrooms and more teachers – notwithstanding the alarming drop in school participation rates and the alarming rise in the number of out-of-school youths.

We maintain one of the highest population growth rates in the world. What makes that fact more obvious to other societies is the fact that we are so obviously dumping our excess population on other nations, either through migration or through migrant labor.

A few years ago, I listened intently to a discussion of demographers and social scientists from related fields. They were explaining calculations that indicate that the "carrying capacity" of our fragile island ecosystem is a population of about 40 million.

Through the course of that discussion, a few thousand more Filipinos were added.

A few more species might have become extinct as our human population presses even harder on our tenuous natural resources. A few more settlements might have sprung up on mountainsides and on perilous riverbanks.

Today, despite the "export" of millions of Filipinos – about four million to the US alone, both documented and undocumented – the archipelago is hard-pressed to support a population of 82 million. If trends continue, this population could actually double before the growth rate begins to taper off.

If we cut down class sizes in our elementary schools to 40, we will need about 108,000 new classrooms to properly meet the demand. That renders hollow this administration’s proud claim that three thousand new classrooms were built during the past three years.

It will take us, at this already rate, about a generation and a half to meet the sheer infrastructure needs of our education system. But by that time, our population should have expanded even further.

We are pushing a large rock up a steep slope.

Maybe it is not a "comprehensive program" to persuade couples to limit childbirth to two that we need. Maybe we should focus on rehabilitating the old population program that managed to curtail our population growth rate during the Marcos years.

When Cory Aquino assumed the presidency, our population growth rate shot up to the level we now see. That was moderated a bit during the Ramos years when a serious population management program was discreetly put in place despite Church objections. The growth rate shot back up again over the last six years.

Will the Lagman proposal be a suitable substitute for the unwillingness of government to court the doctrinal ire of the Church and put in place an effective population management program?

I don’t think so.

I think we are being presented with a placebo of a program that allows government to get away with neglect. I think we are being entertained with an idea that will not work.

And in the meantime, our population growth is wreaking havoc on a fragile environment, taxing the infrastructure for social services and slowly building up a social volcano.

And the more we beat around the bush, the more desperate our demographic picture becomes. The more desperate our population becomes, the more we run out of options to contain the problem.

The more we excuse inaction.