THE Philippines averages 1.7 million births every year. It will be at least 214,000 more next year, according to the University of the Philippines Population Institute and the United Nations Population Fund.
The British Broadcasting Company call them the “unplanned babies” in an article published the other day. A more accurate description would be “lockdown babies” because they were conceived when people were confined to their homes, barred from going out by the strictest quarantine. With time in their hands and nothing much else to do, sex was inevitable.
There are two ways to look at the baby boom, depending on where one is coming from. To those who subscribe to the Church doctrine that the purpose of a sex act is procreation and that every birth is a blessing, the report brings glad tidings.
But to those who have been pushing for planned parenthood as a means of slowing down a runaway population, the birth of so many “unplanned” babies is a cause for concern because it constitutes added strain on the planet’s resources.
BBC said the unusual number of babies expected to be born next year was not only attributable to the quarantine which denied couples access to birth control. It is actually a problem that is years in the making, the article said, and the Church had something to do with it.
Comparing us to Thailand, BBC said that while that fellow Southeast Asian country has reduced its fertility rate from 5.8 per mother in the 1960s to only 1.5 in 2020, the figures in the Philippines showed only a decrease to 2.75 per mother this year from 6.4 in 1969. As a result, while Thailand’s poverty rate is now down to 10 percent, that of our country is still at 17 percent.
“But why the difference? In part, the Philippines’ highly influential Catholic Church, which has led the charge in opposing contraception, encouraging procreation with the verse: ‘be fruitful, and multiply,’” the BBC article claimed.
We have to admit that we’re poorer than Thailand and that’s sad. But come to think of it: between the two countries, where does Jesus have a better chance of coming out of his mother’s womb and surviving if he were to be born again? In that sense, despite our poverty we’re still in a better place.
Merry Christmas!