PLCPD, polls and population myths

If the majority buys the radical birth control initiative, does that make it right? The initiative, called for by population control agencies like the Philippine Legislators’ Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD), based on the Pulse Asia survey on family planning is an argumentum ad populorum — a bandwagon argument.

The survey results should be expected, after all, loaded terms like “family planning,”, and “modern family planning” were associated with artificial contraceptives like condoms, IUDs, and sterilization. Could Pulse Asia’s team analysts, “authorities” on population control like Mercedes Abad, Arsenio Balicasan, and Zelda Zablan, have in any way influenced the gathering of data to its interpretation?

The survey’s respondents were not asked whether they are informed of modern natural birth control based on fertility awareness, like the Billings, Standard Days, Breastfeeding, and Basal Body methods, and whether the government educated them about these over other methods they already know. The respondents were not asked whether they are aware of the side effects of the contraceptives they are using, which is central to the debate on real reproductive health. The problem is that so-called pro-choice groups like PLCPD, funded by contraceptive grants, curtail the advance of natural family planning that suppose to make judgments informed and “fair.”

What was news were not really the survey results, but that the Church is supposedly against birth control itself, whereas Catholic teaching on sex (and also Stoic and Hindu) follows a procreative economics: no sex outside marriage, no divorce and remarriage, and responsible parenthood eliminate many undesirable births.

But of course, what population controllers like PLCPD want is birth control by all means, including the use of abortifacient hormonal contraceptives and IUDs, based on the belief that there is overpopulation — again a flawed argument.

The New York Times’ millennial edition declared overpopulation “one of the myths of the 20th century.” The world’s leading economists say that a large population, if educated, employed, and made productive, is a self-sustaining human capital. These include Nobel laureates in Economics like Simon Kuznets (1971), Gary Becker (1992), Amartya Sen (1998), and  George Akerlof (2001). Singapore and many other Western countries used to draconian population control programs are now paying couples to have children with their birth death. Is PLCPD then promising any better?

Instead, we should oust PLCPD, a private entity pretending to be a government organization, from lodging in the House of Representatives offices without legal authorization from Congress. This non-government organization that lives on questionable polls and population myths has no mandate to use public property. — NICOLO F. BERNARDO, Editor-in-Chief, The Varsitarian