WHY DO ordinary people risk life and limb in selling shabu?
A tricycle driver, jailed for pushing the drug, told a TV reporter, “My tricycle income is not enough to keep my wife and four children alive.”
That explanation may not be acceptable to us who are better off. But that man could not endure the sight of his dependents dying of hunger.
If they had only two kids, he might have thought differently.
There is no more doubt that the population problem in the Philippines has led hitherto law-abiding citizens to turn to crime to make both ends meet.
It is a problem ignored by some leaders of the Church who condemn artificial family planning for being “anti-life.”
During his time as archbishop of Jaro and president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), Angel Lagdameo lobbied against House bills aimed at legalizing artificial family planning. He told the media, “The social doctrine of the Church challenges society and government to regard population not as mere consumer but also to help and facilitate their becoming producers and formal businessmen.”
To cut the long story short, however, a consolidated bill guaranteeing universal access to methods on contraception, fertility control, sexual education, and maternal care passed into law known as the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 (Republic Act No. 10354), The Philippine population at that time was 95 million.
A CBCP spokesman lamented, “It’s not the population that is the problem. It’s the great disparity of wealth. If the wealthy would share what they have, then population would not be a problem.”
That wistful thinking, easier said than done, is a myopic way of defending an undesirable situation where poor spouses make more children than they can afford to feed and educate. The children of the child-rich poor – assuming they survive hunger and hostile environment – grow up to be thieves, robbers, prostitutes and even killers for hire.
Certainly, a wage earner making barely enough to support himself is unfit to marry and multiply because he would be incapable of giving his children “the future.”
Conversely, it is the rich in the Philippines who limit the number of their children to two or three to ensure their good future.
Ironically, other predominantly Catholic countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Poland control their birth rates despite the clergy’s admonition to refrain from using church-banned contraceptives.
The population problem has evolved into pollution problem, as in the case of the Pasig River — now murky and smelly – which used to be a tourist destination.
To quote a few words from an English translation of an 1853 book, Adventures of a Frenchman in the Philippines by Paul P. de la Gironiere, “The newest and most elegant houses are built upon the banks of the river Pasig. Each house has a landing place from the river and little bamboo palaces serving as bathing houses to which the residents resort several times daily, to relieve the fatigue caused by intense heat.”
We can only see the same clean bodies of water today in sparsely populated rural riverbanks.
In the same book, the French author mentioned the 1833 population census. Of the total Philippine population of only 3,345,790, what is now Metro Manila had the highest with 285,039. The provinces of Iloilo, Capiz (including what is now Aklan) and Antique had 232,055; 115,440; and 78,250, respectively.
God forbid that the poor among 109 Filipinos in the Philippines today would live more miserably. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
