THE imposition of new and higher taxes and the strengthening of tax collection efficiency will not lead to any significant improvement in the quality of life for majority of Filipinos. Unemployment, poverty and the social problems that go with it, malnutrition and environmental degradation will continue to plague this country for as long as we fail to address the population issue. We talk about the job potentials in the call centers, medical transcription and IT industries, yet the reality is that millions of Filipino children are malnourished and out of school because of poverty.
Finance Secretary Margarito Teves has pointed out the need for annual economic growth rates of 7 percent to 9 percent just to cope with the growing population.
Education and health care, to mention the most important basic services provided by the government, suffer from poor quality. Yet, any additional resources invested in these sectors are eaten up by the growing number of pupils and patients. Thousands, maybe millions, of children are malnourished that none or very little learning sticks to their brain. And we wonder why our children fare so poorly in math, science and English. Yet, Economic Secretary Romulo Neri believes that "excess population" can replace aging populations in developed countries. But what exactly could the uneducated poor offer to such countries?
The welfare state takes care of those who cannot take care of themselves-the young, the old, the sick, the disabled and the unemployed. Wealth is redistributed through taxes. The productive sectors produce enough surplus wealth and taxes to provide for them and those whose needs exceed their contribution. This isn't the case in this country. The number of families who are incapable of lifting themselves out of poverty grows faster than the resources available for education, health care, housing and other basic services. One major factor for this is the government's failure to make population management a priority.
Lack of affordable modern family planning methods resulted in almost half a million induced abortions in 2000. This represented an 18-percent increase from the 1994 figures, according to the Philippine Legislators' Committee on Population and Development Foundation Inc. Many of the women who resort to these illegal and dangerous abortions are mothers who cannot afford to provide for yet another child.
It is an irony that opposition to modern family planning methods is called pro-life when it is pro-death. How else can we describe views and actions that push women into illegal abortions, parents into overseas employment, children into working when they should be in school? We see the country slip further into economic and social disintegration for our failure to protect and uphold the most basic of the rights and duties of men and women to plan their own families in accordance with their own aspirations, beliefs and capacity. Neither the State nor the Roman Catholic Church takes care of the children whose parents cannot provide for their needs. God gives us the free will to distinguish us from animals, but free will is no match to the pangs of hunger. It is a crime to force people to live like animals when we have the knowledge, the tools and the resources to give them a choice that could help them take responsibility for their own lives and the lives of their children. I wonder why we lack the conscience and why religious doctrine that runs counter to contemporary ideals of human dignity and human rights is the State policy.
The family is the basic unit of society. Failure to provide the family with the information and services that would enable it to be strong, independent, healthy and united spells doom for the Republic. How can there be strength when the foundation is unhealthy, uneducated, fragmented and desperate?
